• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Pedantic rant, but I hate people saying they “believe” in science. Science is not a matter of belief. It’s the realm of the empirical.

    Leave belief to religion and knowledge to science. Mixing the two turns out bad every time.

    • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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      2 hours ago

      First, no, not all science is empirical. You can’t empirically test historical hypotheses, and some psychological ot sociological theses would be very much immoral to test.

      Second, whether we accept some results (or any other information) as “knowledge” is an epistemological issue: What do we classify as knowledge? When can we be sure that it’s not just an assumption sustained by bias? What burden of proof applies where? Can some assumption be useful even if it doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge (yet)?

      Third, the post says “I believe science”, meaning: I trust their results. That is a subjective thing and beyond any empirical or epistemological scope. No matter how sure you may be that a given thesis is knowledge rather than just speculation, whether someone else shares that conviction is a separate question not fully dependent on yours.

      You can call that ignorance, but that doesn’t make a difference either way: If I don’t believe you in the first place, calling me ignorant doesn’t have any more weight either.

      Hence: “I believe that science confers knowledge” is a valid assertion and fundamental premise for working with scientific results in the first place. Whether or not you’d phrase it that way, “Science is not a matter of belief” is a matter of belief too.

      That said, I believe in the importance of tempering assumptions with evidence, empirical or otherwise, in order to constantly test and refine our understanding of the patterns and principles that govern the physical world and our social behaviour within it. I believe that we may not have all the answers, that some things may be fundamentally unanswerable, and that raising assumptions to the level of fundamental truths (like beliefs about the afterlife) is intellectually dishonest. I believe that it is better to say “We don’t know” when that is true, and that we should acknowledge this limit to our knowledge (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to push it).

      In short: I believe in science.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Knowledge is often defined as “justified true belief.”

      Flat Earthers have the science. The science is justified and true. But they refuse to believe it.

      Philosophy has considered those two pretty intertwined for a rather long time.

    • galanthus@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      I quite like that expression. It seems accurate to me, since, as it was pointed out by another commenter replying to you, people do not, in fact, check the experiments themselves, ensure that proper methodology was used, etc. They simply believe what the people in authority positions are telling them, so the word believe is quite accurate - you do not actually know the reasons why certain beliefs, theories are accepted by the scientific community, you just take their word for it.

      Furthermore, any scientist does the same thing to the body research that was developed before him, otherwise, every scientist would have to start over.

    • pancakes@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      I think people are more talking about believing in scientific institutions to ensure credibility and good faith research. Not necessarily that an individual institution is credible, but more the scientific community as a whole can be relied on.

      Science is absolute, however the way we interpret and understand it isn’t flawless and at the end of the day some level of belief has to be put into the fallible people behind it.

      • galanthus@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        If science, as it is practised is flawed, by your own admission, what do you mean when you say that it is absolute?

        • pancakes@sh.itjust.works
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          10 hours ago

          The scientific laws that govern how everything functions from subatomic particles, to beehive structure, to gravity are absolute and unchanging. Our understanding of them is flawed and changes over time, but the laws themselves can’t be changed.

          • galanthus@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            As far as I understand, science is a human endeavour, so I would certainly not say it is absolute, but I see what you mean.

            Although I would say, my position is somewhat different, I do not see any reason to believe that even if these “laws” exist, science has at any level access to them, the “nature of reality”, if you will, “laws of the universe” are metaphysical concepts that can only ever be speculative, scientific laws are not interpretations of them, they are separate constructions.

    • nialv7@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      But you do have to believe though. If you are just a brain in a jar, then all your empirical evidences are just illusions. At the very least you have to have faith that that’s not the case.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Not knowing the answer to something isn’t a belief problem, it’s an ignorance problem.

        For millenia we were ignorant regarding the relationship between the sun and the earth. That didn’t make cosmology a belief system. We were just wrong.

        Faith is not the source of science.

        • nialv7@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          You are not getting what I was saying, let me put it this way, how do you know this isn’t just all a dream you will one day wake up from, and find out that the real real world is run by wizards and dragons?