No it doesn't need explaining Nic, I get it but if you've done a history of science course at uni and seen phlogiston give way to oxygen, the ether replaced by electromagnetic waves, sulphur treatment get the boot by Penicillin ...... I'm not saying science got it 'wrong' by the way. Progress is fantastic, of course it is. I'm saying if you read the academic papers of the time as I have you would know how right they thought their facts were at the time.
Where to draw the line: how Platonism haunts our discourse and the search for exorcism
by slimboyfat 168 Replies latest jw friends
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coalize
That's why, science never speaks about "truth"...
Only the anti-scientific are using "scientific truth" as a pejorative
Science speaks about knowledge!
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slimboyfat
I'm about to have my dinner. I'll just say I agree completely with Xanthippe. Thank goodness somebody thinks I'm talking about more than flat earths and talking rocks.
It can be summed up in the famous statement by Quine: "no statement is immune to revision."
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cofty
I'm about to have my dinner
Since when did Scotsmen have "dinner" at 6pm?
I think you meant your "tea" is ready!
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bohm
cofty: You mean no true scotsman would have dinner at 6pm? :-) -
slimboyfat
I've had my tea. And you'll have had your tea Cofty.
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cofty
Late tea tonight - Homemade sweet potato and squash soup with hot crusty rolls followed by chili beef wraps
See you later
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slimboyfat
nicolaou I can see where you are coming from when you say a statement like:
6) Ronald Reagan was President before Barack Obama.
must simply be true or false. We are unlikely to wake up one day and discover Reagan was never really president or that we got the order the wrong way round. I'm not going to go all Erich Von Daniken on you and say "history is wrong", we've been lied to or anything like that However it remains that what you say is a social fact. For it to be true we must accept a whole lot of socially constructed ways of dividing and describing reality: the world into countries, humans into individuals with names, and job and roles, and terms and elections, and legitimacy, and calendar time and so on. So what at first appears a straightforward statement of reality turns out to be highly contingent on a whole load of socially constructed ways of viewing the world.
Same goes with:
(7) Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun.
The very fact we single out discrete bits of matter and choose to give it names is a social imposition that is not intrinsic to the thing in itself. Notice I'm not merely saying we could give Mercury a different name, but drawing attention to the fact that isolating bits of matter and labelling them planets in the first place is itself a social construction. We could do it differently. We have to agree on a set of terms and how they interact with one another.
Having said all that it is also possible that I've misunderstood the nature of these "facts" or that I've been misinformed of course. How can we ever rule that out? Plus language is always ambiguous. Even the very simple sentences you give could admit different readings from those presumably intended. For example Reagan was president before Obama in a different sense than the piper played the pipes before the queen, although the statement takes the same form. How we avoid misunderstanding such ambiguities is also socially conditioned, not fail safe and subject to change.
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nicolaou
What's it like living in your world Slim'? I gave you seven straight examples and you give me white noise.
I'm done.
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slimboyfat
What kind of answer would have been acceptable?