31–40 of 119 posts
Allow me to save you a click: "established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus"
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.
All statements are false. Some are useful.
The article seems to be making it's definition of "fact" as a guide to policymakers on what should be accepted as fact. I think this is all a bit of a red herring. The question is how do policymakers deal with politically charged topics. And I personally haven't seen cases where more research or "science" is the answer, it's just crutch that people use to try and make their political point. The article mentions clima…
Climate change is a perfect example because oil companies and armed forces worldwide have been operating under the assumption that it's real and its coming, largely because they're the ones who have to deal with, for example, the immediate effects of storm size on ship builders, ports, and deep sea mining equipment. We've got a Jekyll and Hyde government with a Navy that has been preparing for climate change since the 90s while half the country fights tooth and nail against the very concept.
I think the pragmatic approach is to let the experts at the CDC, FDA, EPA, etc do the work they're qualified to do while working on checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture, politicization, and corruption.
The article doesn't fulfill the promise of the title. Not only does it not explain how to identify a scientific fact (who samples the 95% "consensus" and who decides what to ask, for example?), it doesn't even define the term, despite multiple uses. The reason is, of course, that there are no scientific facts. There are hypotheses, theories, and observations. There is a scientific method, which attempts to connect th…
This doesn't solve the problem of "future-proofing" or universalizing facts, because THAT is not a solvable problem. But it does solve the local problem of making a community decision about who deserves respect and what topics are worth debating.
What a terrible, horrible, no-good article. Claiming to be able to arbitrate what is fact and what isn’t without even mentioning epistemology and all the open questions therein, the reason that science is a process and not an end result… very bad form for a professor of philosophy. Maybe he goes into the details in the book he’s flogging (his own book of course) but judging by tfa my confidence is low.
The article is an extended intro for a book the author has written. Perhaps the book mentions these things? Have you read it?
No, I haven't read the book and I shan't for this passage gives me little confidence that the book would do them justice.
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…
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 worse by many orders of magnitude as you go down the scale from "harder" to "softer" sciences, to the point where we don't have any real predictive power at all in many areas of social science.
> a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity
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.
By contrast, the shift from Aristotelian physics to Galilean physics (I say "Galilean" since Galileo was actually the one that started the shift, before Newton was even born) was a Kuhnian paradigm shift, because Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics are incommensurable. Aristotelian physics contains teleological concepts that don't have any counterparts whatever in Galilean physics, not even as approximations.
> older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.
With a true Kuhnian paradigm shift, this is not true: the old theory just gets thrown away. Aristotelian physics wasn't used by anyone after Galilean physics became the dominant paradigm, not even in a restricted scope. This is why Kuhn claimed that there is no such thing as scientific progress. He was wrong, of course: once a particular discipline actually becomes an experimental science (which Aristotelian physics was not), your statement about older theories does hold--Newtonian physics, as you say, being a prime example. But that is not what Kuhn was claiming happened in paradigm shifts.
>The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).…
> In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen). Yeah, that's just not true. It's an absurd claim. Medical science is loaded with examples of things that had wide consensus (but...95%? Probably? Feels like this is a loophole in the argument...) which were subsequently found to be false. Cons…
This reference seems to be saying that mass colonoscopy reduces the 10 year risk of colorectal cancer by a statistically significant amount. How is this calling into doubt its usefulness?
>The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).…
> Do not mistake "useful" for "true." As far as theories are concerned, "useful" means "makes valid predictions", so true, but within a limited scope (Newtonian physics: macroscopic events, from a human perspective).
[0]: Under the Everett interpretation, which is no more or less scientific than the Copenhagen interpretation, this happens all the time and is witnessed by many humans.
>The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).…
I find it repulsive to even entertain the idea of "future proof facts". To me that is hubris to the extreme, especially when it is based upon a consensus of those whose knowledge and instrumentation are grounded in the present.
Finally, as others have noted, science revolves around theories and observations, and what we can currently ascertain from said observations - not facts. Often times "facts" are nothing more than bullshit that has yet to be called out.
Imo, if someone is more interested in carving "facts" into stone than continually engaging with what we think we know - they aren't the right person for the job.
>The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).…
> In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen). Yeah, that's just not true. It's an absurd claim. Medical science is loaded with examples of things that had wide consensus (but...95%? Probably? Feels like this is a loophole in the argument...) which were subsequently found to be false. Cons…