101–110 of 119 posts
I'm not sure what it is people want ( Context maybe or capital T Truth.) but I know you can lie all day long with facts that are undisputed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided. In the original sense of the word, we still don't know whether there are atoms. > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence nee…
> Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided Those are two different facts: 1. Atoms exist 2. Atoms can be divided GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics". >>…
Replacing the meaning of words isn't a minor point, it's the whole thing, and scientific definitions aim to be as strict as possible. If we decided to retire the word "atom" after the discovery of subatomic particles, nothing in reality would be stop existing, except this argument.
If we decided to call the electromagnetic field "the luminiferous ether" - defensible imo - we would be in a similar position. The concepts are incommensurate in similar ways, the word choice is to a degree a historical accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if climate change turns out to be a hoax and we made the world better for nothing?
If climate change turns out to be wrong, nevermind a deliberate hoax, it would result in incalculable damage to the reputation of the entire scientific community for the next century.
Obviously we have warmed the planet a great deal but I don't think that is going to stop the next ice age.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please elaborate on why you insist that the word has no use? There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. Not using the word fact for the latter is useless pageantry if the "well, technically..." kind. The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. This ability is very…
"Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it" Not everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Hell, even those that can, can't perform an experiment to verify it. Maybe you just imagined that you performed the experiment.
This article reminder me of this classic from 1994 by Steven Jay Gould, "Evolution as a fact and theory". [1] I adore SJG but this is one essay where I disagreed. Actually started the first day of a research design course in a pretty heated debate with the dead wood professor where this essay was the topic of discussion, he couldn't wrap his head around taking epistemological or practical issue with the label of scie…
Could you please elaborate on why you insist that the word has no use? There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. Not using the word fact for the latter is useless pageantry if the "well, technically..." kind. The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. This ability is very…
The latter could be the empty set, and no argument I've seen has conclusively proven that it's inhabited. Solipsism is the ultimate refuge from the claim that there are things beyond doubt.
All you can do is make the contingency of facts explicit, like, "given the assumption of an external world to our minds, atoms exist".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
International scientific consensus, in the past, had a man murdered for proving the earth orbiting the sun.
Huh? Copernicus died in his home when he was in his 70s. Galileo died of old age as well. Tycho Brahe died from politeness. Bruno was burned because he was a hermetic mystic and didn't really prove anything significant about the planets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided Those are two different facts: 1. Atoms exist 2. Atoms can be divided GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics". >>…
> "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist. You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. A new experiment you design and perform might not be compatible with the exist…
I was being concrete about atoms, in particular, not about what gets named as a "scientific fact" in general.
Yes, in general you don't reach that threshold of being able to produce a stream of evidence that is always compatible to a theory, and you should not call that theory a fact (I also pointed that out on a different message). However for the existence of atoms, specifically, I do believe we have reached this level.
> Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something
I don't literally believe with 100% certainty that atoms exist (because I may as well be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating my entire universe). I say there will never come a time when we'll disprove the existence of atoms (at their level of abstraction).
The article portrays Popperian falsifiability as a negative thing, when in fact it is exactly the kind of defining criterion that the author is hunting for. Except it is a criterion of a scientific _theory_ , not a fact derived from it; because the natural sciences are entirely empirical disciplines (today), theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments. Progress - in the form of convergence towards t…
> theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets…
I don't think that's an adequate analysis. Newtonian mechanics to General Relativity was indeed a Kuhnian paradigm shift because it required giving up simultaneity, messed with causality, and did away with the notion that space and time were simply an immutable Euclidean background on which particle interactions took place. Instead, spacetime was itself malleable by the entities that inhabited it, and was described by hyperbolic geometry. All of these were tough pills to swallow and required significant revisions to how people thought about reality.
That Newtonian mechanics is embedded within GR is one data point to consider when deciding whether something is a paradigm shift, but it's not the only point that matters.
By your argument, quantum mechanics was also not a paradigm shift because it reduces to classical mechanics in some limit due to decoherence. I think any interpretation of Kuhnian paradigm shifts that excludes arguably the two biggest revolutions in science, ever, cannot be correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets…
> Actually, no, this wasn't a Kuhnian change of paradigm. Why? Because a Kuhnian paradigm shift requires that the two paradigms are incommensurable. And that's not true for relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics. Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics as a particular approximation (low speeds and weak gravitational fields). So Newtonian mechanics is not incommensurable with relativity. I don't think that's an adequate a…
Tell that to Kuhn himself. The requirement of incommensurability for paradigm shifts is his, not mine.
I agree that there is a different concept of "paradigm shift" in science, which does describe what happened when relativity and QM were adopted. But that concept is not Kuhn's concept. In both of those changes (as I've already said with regard to the change to relativity), the old theory was contained in the new one as a special case or approximation. And that is precisely why they are not Kuhnian paradigm shifts--because the theories aren't incommensurable. That doesn't mean they weren't radical changes: it just means that Kuhn's ideas about how radical changes actually happen in science were not very accurate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets…
> While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. It doesn't though. Acknowledging one thing does not mean that all other things are ignored.
That's true in the abstract, but in the particular case we are discussing, the view that a theory cannot be proved goes along with the view that what is important in science is falsification: we rule out competing theories until only one is left standing. But that is not what actually happens. What actually happens is that, as we get more and more data in a particular domain, we refine our models to have better and better predictive power. The more efficiently we can do that (because we are able to conduct controlled experiments with very accurate measurements involved), the "harder" the science is (the "hardest" by this criterion being physics). Nothing ever gets falsified and thrown away.
The other problem with the emphasis on falsification is that scientists still use theories that, by Popper's criterion, were falsified long ago. The obvious example is Newtonian physics. By Popper's argument, we should have abandoned it as soon as we had experimental and observational data, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that contradicted it. But what actually happened was that one branch of physics developed new theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, while other branches of physics kept right on using Newtonian physics, because, even though it was "wrong", it gave answers that were accurate enough for the purpose. In other words, its predictive power, while less than that of relativity and QM, was good enough for what it was being used for.