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>The end-product of science is not truth, it is explanations of observations. That sounds a whole lot like truth to me, or at least, like any sane construal of
by eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>The end-product of science is not truth, it is explanations of observations.
That sounds a whole lot like truth to me, or at least, like any sane construal of truth.
- lisper 9y agoThat depends on what you mean by "truth". Newtonian mechanics says that gravity is pulling you down towards the surface of the earth. Is that "true"? It has tremendous explanatory power, but I would argue that it is not actually true. The truth is (as far as we can tell at the moment) that the surface of the earth is pushing you up and accelerating you through curved space-time.
- jcoffland 9y agoUltimately, it comes down to semantics. Does a vacuum suck or does external pressure push in on the vacuum? My highschool chem teacher said, "there is no suck," but, depending on your perspective, either explanation is valid. Reality is subjective and language is imperfect.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago>The truth is (as far as we can tell at the moment) that the surface of the earth is pushing you up and accelerating you through curved space-time. And in fact, General Relativity is the best explanation science has given us at the moment, which seems to fit what I said.
- forapurpose 9y ago> The truth is (as far as we can tell at the moment) that the surface of the earth is pushing you up and accelerating you through curved space-time. Until this moment, I never suspected how insightful the following is: https://wiki.tfes.org/Universal_Acceleration https://wiki.tfes.org/Universal_Acceleration