When do we have a scientific fact?

The article is an extended intro for a book the author has written. Perhaps the book mentions these things? Have you read it?

Is that really a fact? It seems like _scientific fact_ is a misnomer. Nothing can ever be a fact in science, even with 95% consensus.

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.

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 truth among the community of experts (Peirce) - is achieved by revising theories. Like with software, there comes a point when tweaking the old implementation becomes frustrating, and it's time for a re-write from scratch - that'd be a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity. Different from the realm of software, older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.

The author Peter Vickers appears to have written this blog post motivated by a recent line of work that resulted in a book that came out entitled "Identifying Future-Proof Science": https://academic.oup.com/book/44533?login=false (2022, Oxford University Press); putting it in my shopping basket/on my 2023 reading list & curious to hear from anyone who has read it already.

Crazy idea: I propose someone collect a list of facts - e.g. a wiki - that actual scientists can sign individually (e.g. owners of academic email addresses that do not contain a .stud. sub-string). My contribution of a fact: "On earth, any fruit of _malus domestica_ (commonly called "apple") that is dropped will fall down" (which means from the height of any person towards the centre of earth) as long as (small print to establish the boundary conditions of Newtonian physics).

The author seems disturbed that science fact is socially constructed. His solution is an appeal to social construction. He has not moved the ball by doing this. In fact, he's lost yardage, because now science would have to come together in consensus over his arbitrary 95% rule... which would be yet another social process... just to arrive at an ongoing popularity measurement process. Yuck.

Seems like nothing he said really contradicts Kuhn. Kuhn agreed that normal science operates within a particular paradigm; and in that paradigm there are accepted facts. What we can't know is whether a new paradigm might emerge that rearranges sensory phenomena into a different set of facts that "makes more sense" in some way, or allows certain puzzles to be solved that cannot otherwise be solved. If enough of those puzzles can be resolved in the new paradigm compared the old, the stage is set for scientific revolution.

There must be a stable reality of some kind, because when we operate as if there is, we are perpetually rewarded. But how we think about that reality is not necessarily stable. Oxygen definitely exists. But remember that the guy who discovered oxygen never called it by that name. The original term was "dephlogisticated air" which is a reference to the completely discredited phlogiston theory.