Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are some [legitimate] examples of non-science ways of understanding the world?
Consciousness/experience.
> Consciousness/experience.
These are both scientific.
The Folly of Scientism
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Re: The Folly of Scientism
#52I'd be interested to know if anyone actually holds to the ideas mocked as 'Scientisim', or if it's just another example of a strawman in the 'Darwinist' mold.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#53A reply under the title of "The folly of 'The folly of scientism'" by Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, who frequently reads and comments on issues related to the philosophy of science: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/the-folly... ". . . . Hughes is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging interests, and I’ve really liked some of his papers." . . . . "The big problem with Hughe…
The Hughes article is very strange, but the theme of the sentiment is remarkably (perhaps alarmingly) common among the university students I know who are not scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. This is enormously condescending to write, but I think this is born of frustration at not being able to make progress in discovery without the tools of mathematics and science. If you have not picked up and mastered thes…
> To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science
The irony here is that your argument against the anthropologist is very similar to Hughes' argument against the institutional understanding of science.
The point he's making is that if we reject the institutional understanding and take science to have a special legitimacy because of some property of the scientific method (say, theories are falsifiable by empirical data), the arguments of scientists, and the citing of empirical data don't provide this special legitimacy when the method employed doesn't possess that property. Yet when Hawking does metaphysics, the reverence for science as an institution leads people to treat it as they treat science.
I don't know what sounds anti-science about having a problem with that. Being careful about what we call science is a defence against pseudoscience.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?
Consciousness, experience, spontaneity, 'the present moment'.. There's a very good book on this called "The Wisdom Of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. It's very short and definitely worth a read if this question interests you.
> Consciousness, experience, spontaneity, 'the present moment'..
These are all part of science.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
My intuition says you have angry feelings.
> My intuition says you have angry feelings. This is just the kind of dismissive attitude that makes philosophers unpopular.
I was answering honestly. I receive strong cues from my intuition about other people's feelings.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?
1) Should the US sterilize the mentally retarded? Quoting Wikipedia: "Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[8] Lat…
> We now believe the negatives of the eugenics movement, justifying the genocide done by the Nazis, outweighs any social good which might be possible from the scientific principles behind eugenics.
This is science and politics, and partially based on the science of modern genetics, which shows that a number of things we thought could be stopped using sterilization really cannot be ended in that fashion. Down Syndrome, for example, is genetic but not always inherited, so sterilization wouldn't eradicate it.
> In short, it's better to ban nuclear bombs because of the increased mortality due to radioactive fallout than to have a single-stage-to-Saturn lift technology.
This is, again, a scientific decision based on evidence and reason. Orion may have been stopped for unscientific reasons as well, but that argument is scientific.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness, experience, spontaneity, 'the present moment'.. There's a very good book on this called "The Wisdom Of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. It's very short and definitely worth a read if this question interests you.
Consciousness, experience or the present moment are not a question. What about these? What in particular about them is answered better (i.e. more correctly or truthfully) by non-scientific answers. What answer can be satisfying at all if it is not tested at all? Or if it does not give correct predictions. Feeling better about something or wishing it were so are not good enough criteria in my mind. Finding consolation…
If all question are scientific question then what is a question 'What is right (in the sense of morals)?' and can that answer in any way help me?
Science isn't about truth. Science is about three things. Making hypothesis, making decisions based on hypothesis and testing them. It has no singular answer and that answer changes depending on scales we operate.
Re: The Folly of Scientism
#58Re: The Folly of Scientism
#59Re: The Folly of Scientism
#60A reply under the title of "The folly of 'The folly of scientism'" by Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, who frequently reads and comments on issues related to the philosophy of science: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/the-folly... ". . . . Hughes is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging interests, and I’ve really liked some of his papers." . . . . "The big problem with Hughe…
Wonder if Coyne realizes the circular and non-responsive nature of his reply. To rephrase this, science is the only thing we know. Show me something that's not science that we know. Of course, you can't. You've given yourself the answer before you begin to ask the question. Effective science and humility have to go hand-in-hand. Otherwise you're just creating a new religion with the rubric "science" stuck on it.
To rephrase this, science is the only thing we know. Show me something that's not science that we know. Of course, you can't. You've given yourself the answer before you begin to ask the question.
Er, isn't that the entire point? Coyne didn't set this trap; Hughes did by contrasting science with ???, where ??? is some as-yet undefined way of apprehending truth. It's incumbent on Hughes to solve that dilemma, not Coyne. And, of course, Hughes doesn't. At all.
But since some theoretical physicists can't tell you why the universe exists and evolutionary psychologists still publish papers, the periodic table of elements, Maxwell's equations, and the theory of evolution are all part of a religion. QED!