[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[William Flynn Wallace]

Many of these questions concern the things
that are most important of all: faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, and
goodness — these do not lie in the territory of science.
bill k

Well, too bad for everybody except physics and chemistry and some biology.
Or not.

Develop a measuring instrument.  Use it until you have proved its
reliability.  Apply it to some problem and find that measurements correlate
with something important, which means that you can use it to predict that
something.  Is this not science?

Conclusion:  if you can measure something  and predict something with some
accuracy, I say you have done science.

Science does not imply certain areas of study.  Repeat - NOT.

Of course some things are hard to define, like intelligence.  Whether you
accept the tests as measuring intelligence, they do an excellent job of
predicting important things.  Clearly they measure something, whatever you
choose to call it.  (personally, I'd like to see measurements of dark
energy, and other concepts made up so that the theoretical equations make
sense - some of these concepts make no more sense than saying God did it)

If this is an attack on soft science, then fine.  Every area needs to
improve its precision, generalizability, and so on.  But to call something
not a science just because it cannot measure things to the 23rd decimal
place is just foolish.  Classically throwing the baby out with the bath
water.

Psychology is my area and a lot of it is not at all scientific.  That is
why I got out of clinical to begin my career.  A lot of stupid, unreliable
studies done with questionable statistics - yes, all of that.  More than
plenty, I say.  But we are contributing everywhere, whether it is designing
dashboards for spaceships, or analyzing the dosage of an antipsychotic, or
finding out which brain areas do what, and tons more.

So I would take Bill K's stance as a challenge to do better science, not
find some new name to call it.

bill w



On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 7:00 AM BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 at 19:37, Will Steinberg  wrote:
> <snip>
> >
> > many, many people --including our past and present groundbreaking
> > physicists, as well as modern neuroscientists--have learned enough
> > about the universe to realize how perfectly dumb it is to make
> > overarching claims about a universe we are nowhere close to
> > understanding, from a conscious mind which we are even less
> > close to understanding.
> > _______________________________________________
>
> Quote from -
> <
> https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2016/06/28/are-science-religion-conflict/
> >
>
> In the case of science, the danger is that of scientism, the claim
> that science provides a unique and privileged source of truth on all
> matters. There are many reasons to resist this tendency. As
> philosopher Ray Monk reminds us, there are many questions that do not
> have scientific answers because they were not legitimate scientific
> questions to begin with. Many of these questions concern the things
> that are most important of all: faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, and
> goodness — these do not lie in the territory of science. All of us —
> including scientists — have an interest in resisting the barren
> intellectual monoculture of scientism.
>
> In conclusion, most people do not believe in an inherent conflict
> between science and religion, and the historical evidence suggests
> that they are correct. If we look beneath the surface when tensions do
> arise, we typically find deep-seated conflicts between values that
> have only tenuous connections to science and religion.
> --------------------------
>
> Quote from -
> <
> https://www.aaas.org/programs/dialogue-science-ethics-and-religion/what-scientism
> >
>
> Scientism, on the other hand, is a speculative worldview about the
> ultimate reality of the universe and its meaning. Despite the fact
> that there are millions of species on our planet, scientism focuses an
> inordinate amount of its attention on human behavior and beliefs.
> Rather than working within carefully constructed boundaries and
> methodologies established by researchers, it broadly generalizes
> entire fields of academic expertise and dismisses many of them as
> inferior. With scientism, you will regularly hear explanations that
> rely on words like “merely”, “only”, “simply”, or “nothing more than”.
> Scientism restricts human inquiry.
>
> It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and
> remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the
> natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the
> scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying
> that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist. Once you
> accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have
> adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified,
> or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.
> --------------------------------
>
> There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
> Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
> - Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
>
>
> BillK
>
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>
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