"Scientism" on Wikipedia ...

[mikkel_the_dane]

Are you saying that the material physical world and universe don't exist? the last sentence makes no sense to me still, no matter how many ties you repeat it, I still have no idea what you're asking me to do?

Your post is physical material even for its meaning, right? Or is it non-physical and non-material?

 

[Lain]

I will take a break from another poster.

Science is to explain how something works.
Natural, social, arts, existentially as a human, abstract thinking(logic and math), history and how something works, works (theory of science).

Makes sense, sounds like Aristotle's divisions of science. Those are also how I divide it. So there are at least as many roads to knowledge as these I think.

 

[PureX]

What other ways of acquiring knowledge did you have in mind, and how do you know whether they're any good?

Well, there's philosophy, art, and religion; all of which are endeavoring to better understand the nature of existence and the human experience of it. And all of which employ their own methodologies for doing that, and that are not particularly 'scientific'. And frankly, each of which have contributed far more to the sum of human knowledge and wisdom than science ever has IMO.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Today I've been pondering what to do for lunch....do I want to go into town and get a burger, or do I want to cook something here? I'm still not sure what I'm going to do. Now, I'm sure if we really parsed it down we could identify some empirical steps in my thought process, but IMO the ultimate decision won't be empirical. It's mostly going to come down to how I feel.

What you call "how I feel" is what you believe will give you the best experience at the time of deciding. You know how you feel about getting a burger in town, what it entails to get there and get the burger, and how you expect that to turn out. You also know the same about the alternative. These are both known from prior experience, that is, empirically. The decision you make at the last minute will be your best guess of which of these options you prefer then. Yes, it's subjective, but I think you know what is true for you and what choice is likeliest to result in the more desirable outcome - the better dining experience - based on incomplete information.

What if the restaurant is closed today, or the traffic to get there is insufferable - factors that would have directed you to one option over the other had you known. In that sense you are looking to use experience (empiricism) to successfully predict outcomes (reason), just like the New Horizons scientists and engineers who got their craft to where Pluto would be at the same time. That's what I mean by informal versus formal science, and why subjective truths can and should figure into the reasoning. Being subjective doesn't make it any less true for you than objective truth, as long as it is possible to predict outcomes accurately, which is what I see is the principle value of reason and empiricism.

And thanks for the kind words.

I was told by scientific skeptics that science is not about truth. Further you need to explain what you mean by the world and subjective truths versus truth about the world. Are subjective truths not in the world? Is all the world non-subjective. Please clarify.

I use the word correct rather than true to avoid these conundra. Keep the ideas simple. I suspect that you were told that science is not about proof rather than truth

The world is the arena that we consider to be the source of common experience, and subjective truths about the world are those truths that apply to some but not all. Subjective truths are in the part of the world between the event horizon of consciousness and physical reality outside of my body on the other side of my corneas. They are the physical reality of my nervous system - what it reliably and repeatably true for me.

I prefer not to go down this path again with you. I've previously explained my position to you, and don't find much value in repeating it. You ought to know my views on these matters, since I've given you them in the past. And I am loathe to get into the kind of epistemic nihilism that you like - all the reasons why nothing is true, noting believable, because it's all subjective, and can't be proven. I've rejected that position in the past with an explanation. I was a little disappointed when earlier today, you posted something about my beliefs that I had specifically denied in the past, a major misunderstanding. I am principally a subjectivist, but not like you.

I place primacy in the personally subjective, and consider what others call objective reality to be a model for anticipating outcomes. If you've seem my recent comments to @Jose Fly , you can see where I am promoting the value of subjective truth, with the emphasis on truth, by which I mean ideas that can be used to navigate conscious life most effectively, the seat of subjectivity.

What I'm not is the kind of person who considers what's out there (whatever supports conscious experience) more important than how it is rendered in here. Au contraire. It's the other way around. If the mental map works, it's useful even if doesn't really look like the terrain it's mapping, just as the icons and the images on a computer screen can be understood anticipated and successfully manipulated without an understand of the ultimate digital reality in the computer, in which nothing but electrons is moving. Doesn't matter to the user, and his subjective rendering of that car on the street on his video game screen as an object moving through space is just as good as not better than an encyclopedic knowledge of the instantaneous state of the bits within.

This is subjectivism as well - the screen and the reality that it imitates - cars on roads - is more important than the bits.

If you care to discuss this further in the future, please save this post so that you needn't ask questions previously answered.

Also, I never really know what your purpose is in asking these questions. Do you suspect that I am making an error with consequences? If so, I'd like to know what you think that error its undesirable consequences are. Or maybe you're just trying to understand my position. If so, there it is. Now you know.

Maybe instead of calling it a form of subjectivism, a word with another meaning, I should call this subjective primacy. The subjective is directly experienced. All conscious experience is subjective, and nothing else matters except in terms of how it helps one manage conscious experience. Any idea about reality that does that effectively is a keeper without a second thought to its ultimate truth or objective existence.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

What you call "how I feel" is what you believe will give you the best experience at the time of deciding. You know how you feel about getting a burger in town, what it entails to get there and get the burger, and how you expect that to turn out. You also know the same about the alternative. These are both known from prior experience, that is, empirically. The decision you make at the last minute will be your best guess of which of these options you prefer then. Yes, it's subjective, but I think you know what is true for you and what choice is likeliest to result in the more desirable outcome - the better dining experience - based on incomplete information.

What if the restaurant is closed today, or the traffic to get there is insufferable - factors that would have directed you to one option over the other had you known. In that sense you are looking to use experience (empiricism) to successfully predict outcomes (reason), just like the New Horizons scientists and engineers who got their craft to where Pluto would be at the same time. That's what I mean by informal versus formal science, and why subjective truths can and should figure into the reasoning. Being subjective doesn't make it any less true for you than objective truth, as long as it is possible to predict outcomes accurately, which is what I see is the principle value of reason and empiricism.

And thanks for the kind words.



I use the word correct rather than true to avoid these conundra. Keep the ideas simple. I suspect that you were told that science is not about proof rather than truth

The world is the arena that we consider to be the source of common experience, and subjective truths about the world are those truths that apply to some but not all. Subjective truths are in the part of the world between the event horizon of consciousness and physical reality outside of my body on the other side of my corneas. They are the physical reality of my nervous system - what it reliably and repeatably true for me.

I prefer not to go down this path again with you. I've previously explained my position to you, and don't find much value in repeating it. You ought to know my views on these matters, since I've given you them in the past. And I am loathe to get into the kind of epistemic nihilism that you like - all the reasons why nothing is true, noting believable, because it's all subjective, and can't be proven. I've rejected that position in the past with an explanation. I was a little disappointed when earlier today, you posted something about my beliefs that I had specifically denied in the past, a major misunderstanding. I am principally a subjectivist, but not like you.

I place primacy in the personally subjective, and consider what others call objective reality to be a model for anticipating outcomes. If you've seem my recent comments to @Jose Fly , you can see where I am promoting the value of subjective truth, with the emphasis on truth, by which I mean ideas that can be used to navigate conscious life most effectively, the seat of subjectivity.

What I'm not is the kind of person who considers what's out there (whatever supports conscious experience) more important than how it is rendered in here. Au contraire. It's the other way around. If the mental map works, it's useful even if doesn't really look like the terrain it's mapping, just as the icons and the images on a computer screen can be understood anticipated and successfully manipulated without an understand of the ultimate digital reality in the computer, in which nothing but electrons is moving. Doesn't matter to the user, and his subjective rendering of that car on the street on his video game screen as an object moving through space is just as good as not better than an encyclopedic knowledge of the instantaneous state of the bits within.

This is subjectivism as well - the screen and the reality that it imitates - cars on roads - is more important than the bits.

If you care to discuss this further in the future, please save this post so that you needn't ask questions previously answered.

Also, I never really know what your purpose is in asking these questions. Do you suspect that I am making an error with consequences? If so, I'd like to know what you think that error its undesirable consequences are. Or maybe you're just trying to understand my position. If so, there it is. Now you know.

Maybe instead of calling it a form of subjectivism, a word with another meaning, I should call this subjective primacy. The subjective is directly experienced. All conscious experience is subjective, and nothing else matters except in terms of how it helps one manage conscious experience. Any idea about reality that does that effectively is a keeper without a second thought to its ultimate truth or objective existence.

Good post. Once in a while in some of your posts you claim a "we" that is not there. That is all.
And now I am honest. I have a hard time keeping some of you a part. So I throw you under the bus with some of the other posters. Sorry.
And I know I owe you a post about how I post the way that I do and if there is purpose behind it.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Koldo]

Please stick to THIS conversation, or start another one on another point. This conversation was about my negative opinion regarding the behavior of the 'scientism' adherents. I pointed out some of this behavior because someone asked, using the person who asked as my example, and I'm not going to chase after this accusation any further.

I'm not here to attack or accuse individuals if it can be avoided.

I am sticking to this conversation.
You incorrectly called a given post as an example of scientism.

 

[Windwalker]

Usually of course, what else would I do, but not just god claims of course.

What if they answered, "faith"? Isn't faith good enough, or does faith require evidence? And if it has evidence, then is it actually faith anymore? If you could see a god, like King Kong hanging off the Empire State Building, no faith is involved at all.

Also, what if they said, "experience"? Isn't that actually evidence, beyond simply having faith? If that is what they said they experienced, that is the basis for their belief. Isn't it?

Not sure what you mean by dismiss it, but I am an atheist, so obviously I haven't found theistic apologetics compelling.

Well, apologetics are silly. They are attempts to make the transcendent and ineffable, something tangible like arguing for evidence that ETs or Bigfoots are real. I'm with you in rebuffing most of those. But what do you do with those who claim personal experience? That's not logic arguments. That's personal experience. Those are not based upon tortured logic arguments.

Well if there no evidence then I would be unlikely to believe the claim. I would also consider science to be demonstrably the most successful method we have at understanding the physical natural world and universe. It can't examine claims or ideas that are unfalsifiable of course, or that provide no data for science to examine.

But when it comes to God, or even the majority of human experiences, like love, values, hopes, desires, concepts, beliefs, faith, etc, those are not physical in nature, and the tools of empiric sciences are not equipped to understand the true nature of such things. Those must be understood using different tools, such as introspection, hermeneutics, meditation, etc..

So is it right to say, "show me evidence God exists", when they aren't talking about a creature like bigfoot or and ET? Can we reduce approaching such knowledge to weights and measurements, when we are talking about something non-material?

I think the question is, do you dismiss anything that can't be reduced down to what the empiric sciences can make a pronouncement about? If so, why?

You think asking that a claim be properly evidenced is absurd? I have a bridge to sell you, it's a corker.

I think asking for evidence is fine, when you're dealing with something like a bridge. But do you say to your lover, "I hear you say you love me, but where's your evidence that love actually even exists? Show me what this "love" is you speak of. Can anyone see it?" If you did, I'm pretty sure that love would evaporate right in front of your eyes! Then you'd have evidence for anger, in the form of a punch to the stomach or something.

Well I don't believe in any deity or deities, so I can't say what the claim involves until a theist tells me obviously, as theism is not a single belief, there are thousands of deities, and religions built around them.

But you did just give a very specific idea of what you think God is. That's nothing I'd call God.

I usually ask what objective evidence, if any, they can demonstrate to support the belief. I rarely mention science, as it seems axiomatic if there were scientific evidence to support the existence of a deity we'd likely know about it, I don't see theists keeping that news to themselves. You now theists claim there is scientific evidence for deities on here right?

No I don't claim that. Not sure how you heard that. I do claim that supporting their belief can be on the basis of faith itself. Or better still, personal mystical experience. Beliefs are supports for those, actually. And those are supports for the beliefs as well. They go both ways.

"Scientific evidence" is irrelevant when it comes to these areas of human experience, other than to note faith and mystical experiences are fields of study themselves, which are objective and measurable. But the nature of the experiences themselves, are subjectively understood. You can read about the taste of an orange, but to understand the taste of an orange, you have to experience it directly yourself. Make sense?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I am sticking to this conversation.
You incorrectly called a given post as an example of scientism.

What about the other post?

 

[Koldo]

Well, sorry. He did it here in another post.


Take the sentence itself and now express it in only material physical terms for its meaning of all the words: "However this sounds like you're asking me to accept that something exists beyond the material physical universe,..."

He can't, because there is no for all of the world for all aspects an universel material physical theory. He is using a double standard for in the end to demand science for all of the world but can't do it himself.

Have you heard of supervenience?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Have you heard of supervenience?

Yes, both reductive and non-reductive. Old news, Nobody have be able to do the reductice version. The closest we can get is that the mental supervenience on the physical, but can't be reduced to the physical.

 

[Audie]

@Audie , we have a winning post: This man understands the scientism label and embraces it. Please donate dem dollars to your nearest homeless shelter. The Sally Ann would be good if you have one near you, but I'll let you choose.

Paragraph 2 btw, is textbook use of inductive reasoning as per the OP.

Regards

You will have to show me. I am unable in all
that to detect any sign of an RF poster
who in any way matches the op screediption.

 

[PureX]

I am sticking to this conversation.
You incorrectly called a given post as an example of scientism.

No, I didn't. I referred to negative behaviors that I see being perpetuated by the scientism paradigm. Which is what I was being asked to do.

We're done with this conversation.

 

[Koldo]

Yes, both reductive and non-reductive. Old news, Nobody have be able to do the reductice version. The closest we can get is that the mental supervenience on the physical, but can't be reduced to the physical.

Since you know of supervenience, you know he doesn't need to describe anything in purely material physical terms.

 

[Koldo]

No, I didn't. I referred to negative behaviors that I see being perpetuated by the scientism paradigm. Which is what I was being asked to do.

We're done with this conversation.

Nope. We are not done yet.
Who do you think you are?

You have said and I quote:

"So, having no basis whatever for rejecting this belief, held by some others, you have declared it's both "absurd" and "arrogant" of them to hod it. Which is, in itself, quite absurd and arrogant. Absurd, because you can't offer any of the same support for YOUR opinions as you are demanding of the 'believer' in support of his, and then using the lack of to reject. And arrogant because you are declaring his opinions absurd by the standards of your OWN equally absurd and unsupported opinion.

And even as you EXEMPLIFY the very behavior I alluded to in the OP, you continue to jump up and don demanding examples, and declaring that they don't exist."

You have said his behavior is a case of scientism.

 

[Kooky]

Well, there's philosophy, art, and religion; all of which are endeavoring to better understand the nature of existence and the human experience of it. And all of which employ their own methodologies for doing that, and that are not particularly 'scientific'. And frankly, each of which have contributed far more to the sum of human knowledge and wisdom than science ever has IMO.

Just because you don't need to know how computers actually function in order to use it doesn't mean nobody needs to know how they work in order to design and build one. In fact, you probably couldn't have chosen a worse place to showcase scientific methods' lack of utility than the Internet.

 

[Audie]

What you call "how I feel" is what you believe will give you the best experience at the time of deciding. You know how you feel about getting a burger in town, what it entails to get there and get the burger, and how you expect that to turn out. You also know the same about the alternative. These are both known from prior experience, that is, empirically. The decision you make at the last minute will be your best guess of which of these options you prefer then. Yes, it's subjective, but I think you know what is true for you and what choice is likeliest to result in the more desirable outcome - the better dining experience - based on incomplete information.

What if the restaurant is closed today, or the traffic to get there is insufferable - factors that would have directed you to one option over the other had you known. In that sense you are looking to use experience (empiricism) to successfully predict outcomes (reason), just like the New Horizons scientists and engineers who got their craft to where Pluto would be at the same time. That's what I mean by informal versus formal science, and why subjective truths can and should figure into the reasoning. Being subjective doesn't make it any less true for you than objective truth, as long as it is possible to predict outcomes accurately, which is what I see is the principle value of reason and empiricism.

And thanks for the kind words.



I use the word correct rather than true to avoid these conundra. Keep the ideas simple. I suspect that you were told that science is not about proof rather than truth

The world is the arena that we consider to be the source of common experience, and subjective truths about the world are those truths that apply to some but not all. Subjective truths are in the part of the world between the event horizon of consciousness and physical reality outside of my body on the other side of my corneas. They are the physical reality of my nervous system - what it reliably and repeatably true for me.

I prefer not to go down this path again with you. I've previously explained my position to you, and don't find much value in repeating it. You ought to know my views on these matters, since I've given you them in the past. And I am loathe to get into the kind of epistemic nihilism that you like - all the reasons why nothing is true, noting believable, because it's all subjective, and can't be proven. I've rejected that position in the past with an explanation. I was a little disappointed when earlier today, you posted something about my beliefs that I had specifically denied in the past, a major misunderstanding. I am principally a subjectivist, but not like you.

I place primacy in the personally subjective, and consider what others call objective reality to be a model for anticipating outcomes. If you've seem my recent comments to @Jose Fly , you can see where I am promoting the value of subjective truth, with the emphasis on truth, by which I mean ideas that can be used to navigate conscious life most effectively, the seat of subjectivity.

What I'm not is the kind of person who considers what's out there (whatever supports conscious experience) more important than how it is rendered in here. Au contraire. It's the other way around. If the mental map works, it's useful even if doesn't really look like the terrain it's mapping, just as the icons and the images on a computer screen can be understood anticipated and successfully manipulated without an understand of the ultimate digital reality in the computer, in which nothing but electrons is moving. Doesn't matter to the user, and his subjective rendering of that car on the street on his video game screen as an object moving through space is just as good as not better than an encyclopedic knowledge of the instantaneous state of the bits within.

This is subjectivism as well - the screen and the reality that it imitates - cars on roads - is more important than the bits.

If you care to discuss this further in the future, please save this post so that you needn't ask questions previously answered.

Also, I never really know what your purpose is in asking these questions. Do you suspect that I am making an error with consequences? If so, I'd like to know what you think that error its undesirable consequences are. Or maybe you're just trying to understand my position. If so, there it is. Now you know.

Maybe instead of calling it a form of subjectivism, a word with another meaning, I should call this subjective primacy. The subjective is directly experienced. All conscious experience is subjective, and nothing else matters except in terms of how it helps one manage conscious experience. Any idea about reality that does that effectively is a keeper without a second thought to its ultimate truth or objective existence.

Are you a scientismist? If not why not

 

[PureX]

Just because you don't need to know how computers actually function in order to use it doesn't mean nobody needs to know how they work in order to design and build one. In fact, you probably couldn't have chosen a worse place to showcase scientific methods' lack of utility than the Internet.

I don't really know how this response relates to what I posted. Generally speaking, all science does for us is increase our physical functionality. Whereas philosophy, art, and religion are trying (at least) to increase our collective wisdom, and not just our ability to manipulate the physical world. That's why I made the comment that I did.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Since you know of supervenience, you know he doesn't need to describe anything in purely material physical terms.

But he say he can because he only accepts objective evidence. He even confuses the act of owning a dog with objective evidence.
The markers are there.
Only accepts objective evidence even for owning a dog and claims that the universe is material physical.
From the OP:
"the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methodology and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measured or confirmatory."

 

[Kooky]

Generally speaking, all science does for us is increase our physical functionality.

Generally speaking, all medicine does for us is increase our physical health and well-being.
Generally speaking, all philosophy does for us is ruminate over human existence.
Generally speaking, all art does for us is create aesthetic experiences that reflect on human nature.

What a bunch of useless nonsense, eh?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Generally speaking, all medicine does for us is increase our physical health and well-being.
Generally speaking, all philosophy does for us is ruminate over human existence.
Generally speaking, all art does for us is create aesthetic experiences that reflect on human nature.

What a bunch of useless nonsense, eh?

How do you know if it is nonsense or not?