Who here believes in "Scientism"?

[mikkel_the_dane]

It's your prose I can't follow.

Well, English is not my first language and my English is in effect continental English with a Danish grammar and word understanding. Now add that I overuse philosophy and in fact is not a standard Western culture materialist for philosophy nor theism as per religion.
I come from a weird variant of continental European philosophy.

 

[Audie]

Well, English is not my first language and my English is in effect continental English with a Danish grammar and word understanding. Now add that I overuse philosophy and in fact is not a standard Western culture materialist for philosophy nor theism as per religion.
I come from a weird variant of continental European philosophy.

English is not my first language either.
And Chinese culture is hardly western.

I can generally puzzle through ungrammatical
prose.

It's the overuse of jargon that makes for turgid prose.

Feynman wrote well on the subject of clear writing.
I believe it was he who said that if you cannot
explain something in clear simple terms, you don't really understand it.

Elsewhere he quoted from a psychology book,
a paragraph picked at random.

After puzzling at some length what they were getting at, he summarized it as " people like to read".

I'd read your posts more often, but you make it too much work, and I end unsure what you said.

May I suggest Strunk and White's slim volume,
" Elements of Style "?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

English is not my first language either.
And Chinese culture is hardly western.

I can generally puzzle through ungrammatical
prose.

It's the overuse of jargon that makes for turgid prose.

Feynman wrote well on the subject of clear writing.
I believe it was he who said that if you cannot
explain something in clear simple terms, you don't really understand it.

Elsewhere he quoted from a psychology book,
a paragraph picked at random.

After puzzling at some length what they were getting at, he summarized it as " people like to read".

I'd read your posts more often, but you make it too much work, and I end unsure what you said.

May I suggest Strunk and White's slim volume,
" Elements of Style "?

Okay, short version. A thing is not actually a physical thing. Both physical and things can be understood without using physical and thing in the normal understand as per standard natural science.
Simple enough?

 

[Audie]

Okay, short version. A thing is not actually a physical thing. Both physical and things can be understood without using physical and thing in the normal understand as per standard natural science.
Simple enough?

Simple but I don't think it's at all correct.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Simple but I don't think it's at all correct.

Yeah. The joke is that is neither correct or incorrect. It is one cognitive model and yours is another. We think differently, yet we are both in the everyday world.

 

[Audie]

Yeah. The joke is that is neither correct or incorrect. It is one cognitive model and yours is another. We think differently, yet we are both in the everyday world.

There's dim humor in your assertion sans evidence.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

There's dim humor in your assertion sans evidence.

Yeah, but the problem is that we understand the limit of evidence differently and rate the part of the cognition involved in the concept of evidence, physical and things differently.

So let me try a weak analogy. We are debating 2+2= the following results: 4, 11, 5 and infinite. Further we are then debating how much cognition matters for all the different understandings and which one is correct.

As far as I can understand your position evidence is somehow fully objective and not subjective as for realism. Where as I view the usage of objective, subjective and realism as only one way to do it.

So here is the humor. I am already dead, because I don't do evidence as you do it. In fact I didn't write this post and it is all a hallucination on your part, because I am not in the world at all. My understanding is so incorrect that this exchange in not even happening.

So try on your own to read up on cognitive relativity or don't. I really don't care in the sense, that it is a fact that not all humans understand the world like you, yet they are still in it and that includes me.

 

[YoursTrue]

Speaking of "scientism," I was thinking recently -- why can't we see air? So it is that air does not have color, from what I read. But it has matter. Our eyes can't see it.

 

[osgart]

A simple way to detect scientism is when something abstract is being explained by something physical. An example of an abstract phenomena is the ability of humans to care for something or someone. Scientism wants to explain that in a purely physical sense, and there will never be any way of doing that. There's a gap between abstract phenomena and physical phenomena. So it's necessary to question metaphysical positions on the matter.

Someone might find a chemical response correlated with the ability to care. But it's always a leap of faith to think that the care is purely a physical phenomenon. From my perspective caring is not a chemical cocktail even though there can be chemical response to the caring.

 

[Subduction Zone]

A simple way to detect scientism is when something abstract is being explained by something physical. An example of an abstract phenomena is the ability of humans to care for something or someone. Scientism wants to explain that in a purely physical sense, and there will never be any way of doing that. There's a gap between abstract phenomena and physical phenomena. So it's necessary to question metaphysical positions on the matter.

Someone might find a chemical response correlated with the ability to care. But it's always a leap of faith to think that the care is purely a physical phenomenon. From my perspective caring is not a chemical cocktail even though there can be chemical response to the caring.

It would be more correct to say that there is no way to explain how that is understood by science now. It is very often a mistake to predict what science cannot do. So if someone claims that something currently unexplainable by science is explainable by science that would be scientism. I won't predict that science some day will be able to do so. That would probably be scientism as well. I will merely say that it may be able to do so.

 

[cladking]

So if someone claims that something currently unexplainable by science is explainable by science that would be scientism.

So everything that can be explained by science is explained properly and is thus proven.

This is "scientism". When you know the answers that is "scientism". When you know the experiment, that is understanding.

 

[Subduction Zone]

So everything that can be explained by science is explained properly and is thus proven.

This is "scientism". When you know the answers that is "scientism". When you know the experiment, that is understanding.

No, your approach to science is one of scientism. You of course assume that others use your poor understanding of what science is.. They do not do that so please quit trying to make a strawman.

 

[exchemist]

Speaking of "scientism," I was thinking recently -- why can't we see air? So it is that air does not have color, from what I read. But it has matter. Our eyes can't see it.

That's very simple. None of the gases of which the air is composed absorbs light in the visible region of the spectrum.

Things have colour when they absorb, reflect or scatter one or more colours of the visible light spectrum. For instance leaves are green because the chlorophyll they contain absorbs in the red and the blue, and reflects green.

And the sun appears yellowish when low in the sky, and the sky itself is blue, because dust particles scatter some of the incoming blue light, while letting the rest through unscattered.

Glass doesn't absorb in the visible region either, so it too looks transparent. (But chemists have to use rock salt sample cells in infra-red spectrometers, because glass does absorb in the IR. It also absorbs in the UV.)

 

[George-ananda]

Within the last few months or so, it's been claimed that there are "many" here at RF who believe in and/or advocate for "scientism", i.e., the notion that science is the means to answer all questions, or at least is the means to answer all questions worth answering.

My question to those who claim to not subscribe to 'Scientism' is what other means do you believe in to answer questions worth answering?

Personally, I believe in clairvoyant, mystical and revelatory means for three. It seems to me many here just rely on scientific means and I would classify that as 'Scientism' by the given definition.

 

[exchemist]

My question to those who claim to not subscribe to 'Scientism' is what other means do you believe in to answer questions worth asking?

Personally I believe in clairvoyant, mystical and revelatory means for three. It seems to me many here just rely on scientific means and I would classify that as 'Scientism' by the given definition.

Art, literature, music, history, philosophy, religion.

 

[YoursTrue]

That's very simple. None of the gases of which the air is composed absorbs light in the visible region of the spectrum.

Things have colour when they absorb, reflect or scatter one or more colours of the visible light spectrum. For instance leaves are green because the chlorophyll they contain absorbs in the red and the blue, and reflects green.

And the sun appears yellowish when low in the sky, and the sky itself is blue, because dust particles scatter some of the incoming blue light, while letting the rest through unscattered.

Glass doesn't absorb in the visible region either, so it too looks transparent. (But chemists have to use rock salt sample cells in infra-red spectrometers, because glass does absorb in the IR. It also absorbs in the UV.)

Again, I don't think these things came about naturally by physics, etc. Without a mastermind behind it. Too too amazing. But that's me. Some things are there but we can't see it. Thanks for offering explanation which I don't deny. Amazing.

 

[cladking]

Again, I don't think these things came about naturally by physics, etc. Without a mastermind behind it. Too too amazing. But that's me. Some things are there but we can't see it. Thanks for offering explanation which I don't deny. Amazing.

Glass has about the same density as limestone yet one makes a poor window and the other makes poor cement.

Water vapor is a gas yet clouds block the sun.

Some gasses can be seen and even the air can be seen when it blows the hair from a young woman's face.

Nature is wondrous. And nothing is more wondrous than the properties and behavior of water. How appropriate that life is principally water.

 

[YoursTrue]

Glass has about the same density as limestone yet one makes a poor window and the other makes poor cement.

Water vapor is a gas yet clouds block the sun.

Some gasses can be seen and even the air can be seen when it blows the hair from a young woman's face.

Nature is wondrous. And nothing is more wondrous than the properties and behavior of water. How appropriate that life is principally water.

You probably know that Jesus spoke of living water, don't you? Interesting, thanks for that. Yes, nature is wondrous. John 4: "In answer Jesus said to her: “Everyone drinking from this water will get thirsty again. 14 Whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty at all, but the water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water bubbling up to impart everlasting life.”

 

[blü 2]

Within the last few months or so, it's been claimed that there are "many" here at RF who believe in and/or advocate for "scientism", i.e., the notion that science is the means to answer all questions, or at least is the means to answer all questions worth answering.

I've been a member here for quite some time, but I can't recall seeing anyone advocating such a view. So, to clear this up I'm starting this thread for all of you RF members who do. If you are an advocate for "scientism", please reply to this post with something like "Yes, I am an advocate for scientism as you have described it".

Also, let's keep this focused on the point of the thread, which means no debates about what is or isn't "scientism", whether gods exist, evolution/creationism, or anything else. The thread quite literally has a singular purpose and I'd like to keep it that way.

Scientism is, I find, an ambiguous term. It begins as a word for those who favor scientific method ahead of faith. It then gets to be used as an insult meaning anyone whose beliefs in science are seen by the speaker as simplistic or excessive.

I'm a materialist ─ I stand ready to be persuaded otherwise by reasoned argument and satisfactory demonstration, but nothing happens ─ and in my view, scientific method is the best way to explore, describe and seek to explain the world external to the self.

But it doesn't work very well, often not all, in assessing certain kinds of human judgment. For instance, it's not the best way to determine whether Tennyson's "Ulysses" is a better or worse poem that Whitman's Leaves of Grass or whether either is esthetically superior to the Shelby Mustang or the Noh play I may write about the Fox's Wedding. Or whether Coke is better than Pepsi (as distinct from, say, Is Coke healthier than Pepsi?).

 

[Audie]

Yeah, but the problem is that we understand the limit of evidence differently and rate the part of the cognition involved in the concept of evidence, physical and things differently.

So let me try a weak analogy. We are debating 2+2= the following results: 4, 11, 5 and infinite. Further we are then debating how much cognition matters for all the different understandings and which one is correct.

As far as I can understand your position evidence is somehow fully objective and not subjective as for realism. Where as I view the usage of objective, subjective and realism as only one way to do it.

So here is the humor. I am already dead, because I don't do evidence as you do it. In fact I didn't write this post and it is all a hallucination on your part, because I am not in the world at all. My understanding is so incorrect that this exchange in not even happening.

So try on your own to read up on cognitive relativity or don't. I really don't care in the sense, that it is a fact that not all humans understand the world like you, yet they are still in it and that includes me.

Metaphysics o the gap?
If the riddles of thought are ever worked out
it sure wont be via philosophy or metaphysics.

Nor will how,to find oil or fix the toaster.

Other than providing amusement, or, annoyance
there seems no utility at all, or,,worse if it
has one thinking thar 2+2=11, or that they're dead.