Multiculturalism has failed.

[Datepalm]

Galactus is merely stating a view of science by people outside of science. It's a facile semantic trick to reduce one of civilisations greatest accomplishments, and a movement completely at variance with the rest of human thought, to yet another language game, a social convention, or a product of other societal conventions.

When you're a social scientist, everything looks like that. When you pick your scientific trends you can make it fit. That's why people in science studies know a lot about quantum mechanics and Gödel's theorem, but know nothing about population genetics, statistical mechanics, combinatorics, algebraic geometry, … well, almost anything.

Real scientists find science studies cute at best, misguided at worst, and malevolent when they are paranoid.

I don't think Galactus was actually was actually saying the science is that reducable. I can see the argument that certain priorities and ways of thinking amongst the population are going to get scientists heads (along with everyone elses) working in particular direction that will lead to an emphasis in some types of research above others.

What are the great scientific breakthroughs of the post modern age anyway, since I don't think the Iphone counts? Genetics?

I'm mostly with you on social sciences though - that is, I see their purpose, more or less, but I think that in the sense that the whole cluster - sociology, economics, poli sci, geography, etc - is meant to interpret (and in some subjects, plan) human societies, its entirely an ideological product.

[Red Sun]

What are the great scientific breakthroughs of the post modern age anyway, since I don't think the Iphone counts? Genetics?

I'm not sure that HE even speaks about post-modern breakthrough, because he mentioned "a movement completely at variance with the rest of human thought". So, I guess he means enlightenment and its consequences for the ideas of personhood and for rational thinking as a fundament of science, real science. As for the post-modern scientific breakthroughs, I do think that the discoveries in genetics have to count.

However, I do think there is a disparity between basic research and the interpretation of its results, since those interpretations, and especially extrapolation from samples to patterns to generalisation, are part of those pesky language games. With regard to the discussion, I think it's highly possible that genetic dispositions and cultural factors are interdependent, however, all those explicatory short-cuts that fit so neatly within existing prejudgements or stereotypes make me queasy.

I have the same problem in my own area of work, when too many steps are skipped between working with sources that, through their materiality, have basis for an empirical analysis and generalising about the development of human society with regards to the effects and influences of religion, since the individual results are pretty complex and the interpretations often superficial.

[Happy Ent]

What are the great scientific breakthroughs of the post modern age anyway, since I don't think the Iphone counts? Genetics?

As long as we distinguish (as you do) post modern “age” from post modern “mindset”. Because whatever these breakthroughs are, they are the exact opposite of the postmodern mindset. Science has bravely soldiered on along the trajectory planned by modernism, towards ever increasing positivism, reductionism, formalism, rationalism, “system”-ism. It’s data-driven, objective, accountable, quantitative. The exact opposite of postmodernism.

[Datepalm]

As long as we distinguish (as you do) post modern "age" from post modern "mindset". Because whatever these breakthroughs are, they are the exact opposite of the postmodern mindset. Science has bravely soldiered on along the trajectory planned by modernism, towards ever increasing positivism, reductionism, formalism, rationalism, "system"-ism. It's data-driven, objective, accountable, quantitative. The exact opposite of postmodernism.

Lets put it a different way - what have been the singificant changes or new revalations to our understanding of the natural world in the past 25 or so years, and how are they different from the way we thought we understood it before?

I have the same problem in my own area of work, when too many steps are skipped between working with sources that, through their materiality, have basis for an empirical analysis and generalising about the development of human society with regards to the effects and influences of religion, since the individual results are pretty complex and the interpretations often superficial.

I think this is what I mean by the role of ideology. Theres a solid, scienc-y methodology in the humanities and social sciences for gathering their information - about the past or the present or whatever the subject of study is - but the the interpretations they give to that are purely ideological. In the humanities I think you can stay objective there - its in some sense an ideological choice to also study womens history, but it dosen't wipe out everything we know about which king killed which other king. But with Social sciences, when beyond the data gethering and explanations stage theres a perscriptive step - people living by a subway station behave like this, and so if we build more subways the world will look more like that - and thats just pure ideology.

[Red Sun]

In the humanities I think you can stay objective there - its in some sense an ideological choice to also study womens history, but it dosen't wipe out everything we know about which king killed which other king.

This is right, but this is also an example where new perspectives (for ex. on female experiences) pushed people to consider sources that have largely been overlooked. Before the more extreme forms of women studies that very often did not remain based on the sources, female areas were not even considered worth a deeper look at all, even though sources exist that can be the basis for empirical researches and offer a large enough group of samples to identify plausible societal patterns. So, in most cases, ideological influences (like new choices of perspectives) and empirical study of the material are correlated, but as long as the methodology is clear and if the degree of extrapolation is not too high, the results can remain believable. That's only for history, though, other "real sciences" have other methodologies and of course gals.

The problem with humanities is that you can not simply drop them either (and I say that not only because I want to keep my job), because general public discourse will always use history or sociology in arguments, so it seems helpful to be able to point out which arguments are at least plausible and which are complete bullshit. Especially when it comes to "our roots" or "our culture" or the "Judeo-Christian fundaments of our culture", talking points that come up in recent statements, and ironically, it's rarely the enlightenment or rationalism that are presented as the fundaments of the culture.

[shadowbinding shoe]

Re: the Ottoman Empire - I'm sure it wasn't the most important factor for the Ottoman empire's lack of a golden age but the use of eyeglasses was banned in the empire. This presumably hurt the ability of scholars to read and perform experiments. Though Turks and Persians have long considered themselves superior culturally to the Arabs.

[Datepalm]

Re: the Ottoman Empire - I'm sure it wasn't the most important factor for the Ottoman empire's lack of a golden age but the use of eyeglasses was banned in the empire.

So was printing, IIRC, for a ridiculously long time. (And then it was gradualy unbanned for foreign languages before it was unbanned for Turkish itself.)

[Angalin]

the use of eyeglasses was banned in the empire

:stunned: Early fashion police at work? I can at least see banning printing so the texts can be controlled, but specs are specs.

[Guest Raidne]

Because whatever these breakthroughs are, they are the exact opposite of the postmodern mindset. Science has bravely soldiered on along the trajectory planned by modernism, towards ever increasing positivism, reductionism, formalism, rationalism, “system”-ism. It’s data-driven, objective, accountable, quantitative. The exact opposite of postmodernism.

Yes, I agree 100%. Science, by definition, cannot be post-modern. And vice versa.

I don't know what your issue is in your earlier post with people who are not scientists thinking about science though. There is a whole discipline called the philosophy of science, and it sounds like you have just chosen not to believe in it?

I don't get Shryke either, who seems to not believe in the entire discipline of the history of ideas.

Lets put it a different way - what have been the singificant changes or new revalations to our understanding of the natural world in the past 25 or so years, and how are they different from the way we thought we understood it before?

Maybe it's been going on longer, and I know you weren't asking me, but to me, on the philosophy of science level, the biggest thing is the realization that we really don't know what reality is, and we don't even know if we are capable of understanding, metaphysically, what reality is. But if we were post-modern, we'd just leave it there and not keep going, which is of course not at all what physicists are doing.

I think this is what I mean by the role of ideology. Theres a solid, scienc-y methodology in the humanities and social sciences for gathering their information - about the past or the present or whatever the subject of study is - but the the interpretations they give to that are purely ideological. In the humanities I think you can stay objective there - its in some sense an ideological choice to also study womens history, but it dosen't wipe out everything we know about which king killed which other king. But with Social sciences, when beyond the data gethering and explanations stage theres a perscriptive step - people living by a subway station behave like this, and so if we build more subways the world will look more like that - and thats just pure ideology.

I call bullshit. First, let's separate the social sciences from the humanities. The social sciences use the scientific method. They are science. Whatever people say, I would disagree that history is a social science (I also happen to disagree that women's studies is even a discipline, but that a whole other issues). People do not use the scientific method to do history.

There is no truth in history. You say we know who killed what king, but we do not. We do not know. It is impossible for anyone to know. There is no "truth" in history. We have our best guess. But you can never, ever prove it. And your own best guess is going to tainted by your own personal biases.

For instance, Michel de Montainge mentored Marie de Gournay in philosophy, but he also wrote an essay on why women should not study philosophy. So what, really, was his attitude toward women studying philosophy? I can assemble the evidence and make my best guess, but I'll never know, and as if I could ever be a wholly unbiased, objective person on the possibility that my favorite, favorite philosopher was a hopeless sexist?

That is what post-modernism looks like in the humanities - it is the point that there is no objectivity, and I don't think there is a possible comparison in science, IMHO.

[Galactus]

I can see the argument that certain priorities and ways of thinking amongst the population are going to get scientists heads (along with everyone elses) working in particular direction that will lead to an emphasis in some types of research above others.

That was mostly my point, yes. Scientists are human, they are part of society, they are going to be focused on what society considers to be important issues (in a crassly economical sense, what they can get money/respect/fame out of, even if only from their peer-group) Science is as much subjects to the various pressures of human society/the natural world as any other human activity. We take for granted that politics, say, are affected by the society we live in, yet the idea that science too is is considered weird?

Which isn't to say that scientists are coming up with wrong answers: I don't think that's how it works. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing at all (there's nothing wrong about focusing on what is considered to be important/interesting/rewarding)

My point is simply that I suspect that how scientific ideas are adopted has more to do with the climate of society in general, rather than their "truth value".

There is no truth in history. You say we know who killed what king, but we do not. We do not know. It is impossible for anyone to know. There is no "truth" in history. We have our best guess. But you can never, ever prove it. And your own best guess is going to tainted by your own personal biases.

Of course, with sufficient scepticism that applies to ANYTHING. And thus we ends in a kind of epistemological nihilism: We can't know anything at all, for sure.

What we can do is make a bunch of reasonable assumptions.

I should also note that if you want to nitpick it, any experiment is historical, that is, there's a lag between the experiment and the conclusions drawn (no matter how brief) that makes it historical. We after all do not think instantly.

[Guest Raidne]

If nothing else, ideas get around a little faster when we don't put people under house arrest or burn them alive for having them.

Also, genetics and other forms of biological research, I would think, will be significantly limited by what advances society will except. Like, grow a steak in a petrie dish that tastes good? Brilliant! Human cloning - not so fast.

[Galactus]

Galactus is merely stating a view of science by people outside of science. It's a facile semantic trick to reduce one of civilisations greatest accomplishments, and a movement completely at variance with the rest of human thought, to yet another language game, a social convention, or a product of other societal conventions.

When you're a social scientist, everything looks like that. When you pick your scientific trends you can make it fit. That's why people in science studies know a lot about quantum mechanics and Gödel's theorem, but know nothing about population genetics, statistical mechanics, combinatorics, algebraic geometry, … well, almost anything.

Real scientists find science studies cute at best, misguided at worst, and malevolent when they are paranoid.

Eh? Statistics was a pretty majorly recommended course for historians (mind, Umeå is pretty focused on demography in the first place)

EDIT: I find it incredibly funny how I'm here arguing, essentially, that the scientific community and what it does is subject to, essentially, evolutionary pressures, and HE is steadfastly denying it.

[shadowbinding shoe]

Galactus - I'd say outside pressures and influence of science by society are limited by how human-related the subject is. There is a reason why no one doubts the objectivity of mathematicians, few doubt the objectivity of physicists and everybody doubt the objectivity of historians and sociologists. Why the theory of human evolution had a much harder time being accepted than the theory of animal evolution and both of them faced bigger problems than the field of Entomology

[Datepalm]

There is no truth in history. You say we know who killed what king, but we do not. We do not know. It is impossible for anyone to know. There is no "truth" in history. We have our best guess. But you can never, ever prove it. And your own best guess is going to tainted by your own personal biases.

Well, y'know, who killed Kennedy? Where does history stop and it begins being stuff we actually know? Theres stuff we know, and stuff we probably know, and some stuff we know we don't know, which is also something historians probably know a lot more about than laymen.

In social sciences the inforation gathering might be more scientific, because you can repeat the experiment, whereas you can't kill Kennedy again, but when you get down to the why's, its pure bias/ideology/whatever. (Humanities have their whys as well, but I think that finding the what is important there as well, whareas in the social sciences you know whats what - the whole point is to find an interpretation.)

[Galactus]

Galactus - I'd say outside pressures and influence of science by society are limited by how human-related the subject is. There is a reason why no one doubts the objectivity of mathematicians, few doubt the objectivity of physicists and everybody doubt the objectivity of historians and sociologists. Why the theory of human evolution had a much harder time being accepted than the theory of animal evolution and both of them faced bigger problems than the field of Entomology

In general that seems likely. However, I wouldn't neccessarily underestimate the controversy of physics and maths. (it's just that THOSE battles were fought long ago) there's probably a reason why mathematicians tends to be religious weirdoes :P (from Pythagoras to Leibniz :P)

[Altherion]

My point is simply that I suspect that how scientific ideas are adopted has more to do with the climate of society in general, rather than their "truth value".

Only in the short term. The truth is not defenseless and will eventually prevail (or at least it has so far). The problem science that is based on the climate of society eventually runs into is that our observations of the universe tend to be interconnected. Society can burn Bruno at the stake and forbid Galileo's books, but eventually other people will find things like stellar parallax and only the most hardcore traditionalists will be able to do the mental gymnastics it takes to keep their view.

Eh? Statistics was a pretty majorly recommended course for historians (mind, Umeå is pretty focused on demography in the first place)

First, statistics is not something you can learn in one course. It's very tricky and even people who have studied it extensively occasionally get it wrong. Second, even if you do know statistics, that is not enough to do real science: any experiment (even something as simple as a measurement of length) will always have systematic uncertainties which no amount of statistics will help you with and it is this which typically leads to wildly different results.

For example, suppose the science project of some child in a rural area is to measure the average height of the cornstalks in a local farmer's field. There will be a statistical component to this because the field typically has tens of thousands of plants (or more) and the kid is not going to measure every one of them. But there will also be systematic errors that would not go away even if every plant was measured. For example, if the ruler the kid was using claimed to be 30cm long but in fact was only 29.5cm, every measurement would always be off by a little under 2%. There might be other subtle effects like the child only measuring the plants at the edge of the field, but the ones in the middle being slightly different.

The problem with social science is that practically any interesting experiment will have a monstrously complicated systematic uncertainty (the latter are very annoying even when you are dealing with something relatively simple, like a bunch of completely identical elementary particles). Personally, I have no idea how to even estimate something like that when it deals with human beings. The reason I became derisive of the social sciences is that when I went to see how they do it, I found that they either don't do it at all (quoting only the statistical part of the uncertainty) or they make some pitifully incomplete attempt and leave it at that. You'd think they'd call each other on it (that's how peer review is supposed to work), but instead they split along ideological lines and only call the other side out for bad methodology.

EDIT: I find it incredibly funny how I'm here arguing, essentially, that the scientific community and what it does is subject to, essentially, evolutionary pressures, and HE is steadfastly denying it.

It's pressure, but there's nothing evolutionary about it. Evolution usually tends towards something that will endure, this kind of pressure is merely delaying the inevitable.

[Shryke]

That was mostly my point, yes. Scientists are human, they are part of society, they are going to be focused on what society considers to be important issues (in a crassly economical sense, what they can get money/respect/fame out of, even if only from their peer-group) Science is as much subjects to the various pressures of human society/the natural world as any other human activity. We take for granted that politics, say, are affected by the society we live in, yet the idea that science too is is considered weird?

Which isn't to say that scientists are coming up with wrong answers: I don't think that's how it works. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing at all (there's nothing wrong about focusing on what is considered to be important/interesting/rewarding)

My point is simply that I suspect that how scientific ideas are adopted has more to do with the climate of society in general, rather than their "truth value".

And that's where you are missing alot because this isn't really how it works.

Stuff doesn't come up and get continually rejected till it fits with what society wants to believe. Stuff comes up and MUST be accepted because hard science gives you no other option.

It doesn't matter what society thinks. No matter how much people may believe, the results don't change. Quantum Mechanics did not pop into existence because we suddenly became less certain of stuff. The theory itself didn't even pop up because it that. It came about because that's when we got around to doing that kind of work and BAM there it was.

No one was going around yelling about this shit and not being heard until society decided to finally acknowledge it. Even guys like Gallileo didn't work that way. It's not like there were a bunch of people saying the same stuff over and over till finally one of them got listened to. Those people were building on the work of others, even if those others weren't accepted by society. Science marched on whether society believed it or not.

[Galactus]

Stuff doesn't come up and get continually rejected till it fits with what society wants to believe. Stuff comes up and MUST be accepted because hard science gives you no other option.

No, there's just no evidence this is the case. It gets accepted when it becomes useful to accept it (because it provides something, either ideologically, or just a neat toy).

That's the basic rule: It doesen't matter who discovered it, or who invented it, the important guy is he who made people accept it.

The universe does not care about the truth.

t's not like there were a bunch of people saying the same stuff over and over till finally one of them got listened to.

Yes, that's exactly how it was. (at least with heliocentrism, and evolution, I'm less knowledgeable about QM)

EDIT: To reiterate, my point isn't that science isn't right, or isn't the best way to provide statements of decent truth-value. It is, x2.

It's just that this is not the reason why science exists, it exists because it provides useful things ("things" being all sorts of stuff, not neccessarily that directly related to the scientific inquiry in question).

[Shryke]

No, there's just no evidence this is the case. It gets accepted when it becomes useful to accept it (because it provides something, either ideologically, or just a neat toy).

That's the basic rule: It doesen't matter who discovered it, or who invented it, the important guy is he who made people accept it.

The universe does not care about the truth.

No, people don't care about the truth. The universe doesn't care at all. It doesn't even make any sense to say the universe "cares". The universe simply is.

It didn't matter how much the Church disliked Gallileo or Heliocentrism. The evidence and the ideas behind simply went on whether they wanted it to or not.

Society's acceptance of these idea was simply societies acceptance of them and no more. It had no effect on their existence or their truth value.

The Earth always revolved around the Sun. Science didn't prove it because society was ready for it, science proved it and then society was forced to deal with it.

Yes, that's exactly how it was.

No it's not. Simply, there was 1 theory of relativty proposed. It had to be accepted, even though many were trying to disprove it's assumptions at the time (and failing).

There wasn't 6 Einsteins before Einstein who just weren't listened to. There wasn't 8 papars on the photoelectric effect all saying roughly the same thing, but they were all ignored till society decided it was now ok to quantize light.

Your observation seems to rest on your lack of understanding of developments in science.

It's just that this is not the reason why science exists, it exists because it provides useful things ("things" being all sorts of stuff, not neccessarily that directly related to the scientific inquiry in question).

Mostly it seemed to happened because people were curious. Gallileo wasn't snubbing the Church because it was "useful".

And again, here, we have the example of people doing shit DESPITE society.

[Galactus]

No, people don't care about the truth. The universe doesn't care at all. It doesn't even make any sense to say the universe "cares". The universe simply is.

It didn't matter how much the Church disliked Gallileo or Heliocentrism. The evidence and the ideas behind simply went on whether they wanted it to or not.

Society's acceptance of these idea was simply societies acceptance of them and no more. It had no effect on their existence or their truth value.

The Earth always revolved around the Sun. Science didn't prove it because society was ready for it, science proved it and then society was forced to deal with it.

Completely irrelevant to anything I've said thus far. Please restate your arguments so that they make sense in the context of this discussion.