• Juice@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    91
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    Science isn’t an ontology, it’s a method.

    God, what no humanities does to a mf

    • PunnyName@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      18 days ago

      Exactly. I keep trying to get people to understand that it’s a process, just like running is a process.

      • 5715@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        17 days ago

        I have the suspicion, once you’re far enough in any field, you’ll view as a process what colloquially is considered a binary state. You’ll continue talking like it isn’t a process, because you don’t have the time to explain it all the time.

    • zloubida@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      18 days ago

      And a method in which beliefs are important. Not the religious ones, of course, but there are other kinds of beliefs.

    • Preußisch Blau@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      18 days ago

      Believing that science yields universally true results or is the only method of finding truths, however, is an ontology and something you have to believe.

      Edit: I’m not anti-science or anything, just a pedant.

      • yesman@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        17 days ago

        Believing that science yields universally true results or is the only method of finding truths

        You just described science as though it were a belief system. In reality, science has a presumption that your ideals are false, not true. And a person who could only discover truth through science wouldn’t be able to dress or feed themselves.

      • flora_explora@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        16 days ago

        I agree with the second part of that sentence, but who would think that they discover universal truths or any truths at all? The whole premise of science is that we cannot verify anything or find any real truth. We can just show that anything else is much more unlikely to be true.

    • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      17 days ago

      problem?

      seems like you’re drawing on a guilt by association fallacy

      Is there anyone out there who hates Ben Shapiro and the temperamental cranks who act like their subjective appeals to emotion & outrage have anywhere as much merit as valid, objective arguments that take actual effort? The latter is tiresome, and they absolutely deserve Ben’s catchphrase: everyone should be appropriating it to nobler causes than Ben’s to annoy him & criticize those irrational twerps.

    • psud@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      17 days ago

      That’s medicine. Science just sees it as a problem to be sorted by good study design and statistics

  • OpenStars@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    Until you turn your head and stop observing, and then it reverts back to mysticism. :-P

    img

    • psud@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      17 days ago

      You’re referring to quantum effects? Don’t worry about whether you’re not watching, the universe is watching. If one photon is emitted from the thing in a quantum state and hits anything, that’s the observation

    • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      17 days ago

      What do you mean? Sociology I kind of get, but psychology nowadays is a purely quantitative discipline (despite its subject being squishier than other quantitative sciences).

      • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        18 days ago

        Yep that’s the joke, although I should probably have made it more obvious given that it’s the internet and there are real people who probably post this sort of stuff sincerely.

        • foodandart@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          18 days ago

          LOL! forgot the /s…

          Yaahh… I used to go around on Reddit wth those types all the time! That is one level of ignorance I do not miss by being on lemmy…

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    18 days ago

    Technically correct since science is a concept and doesn’t have feelings, unlike animals, and possibly plants, fungi, all forms of life, who knows, rocks? Idk.

  • Pika@rekabu.ru
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    16 days ago

    This is mostly shared as an arrogant statement towards laymen, but really, it’s a reminder for scientists themselves

    No matter what you think or believe your experiment should yield, reality check is always waiting around the corner.

    Nice, when seen in this light!

    • xep@discuss.online
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      18 days ago

      Science isn’t a belief system. It’s a way of making sense of natural phenomena.

    • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      18 days ago

      If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

      • Murray Gell-Mann

      “it posits that the universe functions according to predictable rules”

      • you

      Not quite. Cosmologists accept a certain distribution of predictable phenomena within known parameters while leaving the door open to chaos, outliers, the as of yet unknown and unknowable.

      Complexity theory is a model that posits components interact in multiple ways and behave according to local rules. From quantum physics to cosmology and the aspirational yet elusive grand theory of everything, science is prepared for a world weirder than we understand, and possibly weirder than we can understand.

      Just because empirical evidence and the development of predictable rules are a very fruitful line of inquiry doesn’t mean we believe that is truth.

      Philosophers of Science have rather lengthy volumes of work on the subject. I’m just a novice on the topic, but my take on the state of the subject is that we don’t accept science and even it’s laws as absolute truth, just a very practical, reliable, utilitarian form of inquiry and understanding which includes uncertainty (Heisenberg), probability, complexity and chaos. Scientists are prepared to abandon everything in exchange for something better.

      Look at newtonian physics. No one thinks it’s the truth, it’s just simpler and useful for everyday engineering.

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        17 days ago

        There are rules that govern stochasticity, and especially the behavior of large aggregates of things that indivdually behave stochastically. It’s not a tradeoff of 100% locked-down order or headless-chicken chaos. There’s a continuum.

        No one thinks it’s the truth

        Within a certain range of scale, speed and energy, it’s an excellent approximation of the truth.

        • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          17 days ago

          Within a certain range of scale, speed and energy, it’s an excellent approximation of the truth.

          You could have just said “Yeah.”

    • Zwiebel@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      17 days ago
      • observe
      • write down observation
      • try to find a discernable pattern
      • test pattern

      We do not believe that it functions according to predictible rules, we simply look for rules and we have infact found some. That is why we can design a scyscraper and know that it won’t topple without trying it out first.

    • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      17 days ago

      we define “science” as the aggregate consciousness of scientific researchers

      This is something I wish I could preach convincingly to everyone. The activity of scientists, a social group, are arguing and trying to convince one another that their interpretation of the data acquired by using their tools and methods is what become a scientific consensus.

      Forefronting the method (often a vaguely defined one rooted in a hypo-deductive model from about 150 years ago that most people learned in grade school) removes the relationships between people and other people and people and institutions.

      I wish I could find the paper but there’s a wonderful enthographic study on how scientists interact with each other to transform the discourse.

      Edit: Found it! Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry by Helen E. Longino