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The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it).

The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it)... not "faith". Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.

cyborgx7 8y ago
I've explained this to people a couple of times who make the "faith in science" argument. The difference is that you -can- verify it, not that you did verify it. Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.
- balfirevic 8y ago
  Another good way to frame that is to say that we have reasonable expectation (based on previous accomplishments) of scientific discoveries being true.
  - srean 8y ago
    I think it would be fair to say that the goal science aspires to is "not obviously wrong". It is indeed a moving target and a tough one.
- superqwert 8y ago
  I think you may have a different understanding of "faith in science" than brobdingnagians. It could mean anything, such as: 1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim) 2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed) 3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology. Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
  - 13415 8y ago
    Position 1 is analytically true. No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false. Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
    - Miltnoid 8y ago
      What do you mean by "analytically true"
      - FabHK 8y ago
        Basically, "analytic" = "by definition", while "synthetic" = "empirically". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction
    - superqwert 8y ago
      I would agree on position 1, but there are many different possibilities it were not true, such as if you were living in a simulation. My point 2 was not supposed to mean that current theory was wrong as much as there (most likely will) be a more accurate better theory that will replace current ones. No-one disputes that (non-Microsoft) cell phones work. The problem lies on the philosophical side - Newtonian mechanics caused a big problem in that it was quite strongly suggestive of determinism. But more underlying theories, such as QM make the situation more difficult and complex. Assuming the current or fashionable theory of the time is correct is very likely to lead to a temporary or fashionable philosophy. Position 3 - Science is an empirical study of reality - it cannot in any way explain why it is not some other reality, for example. If it is governed by logic/maths, unless every mathematical construct has physical existence (which is a rather weird and unrealistic idea), you cannot explain why this mathematical construct has existence and another does not. You may argue that other studies may be pointless, but you definitely cannot claim analytically and for certain that science can ever explain everything - so this is the point at which you are bringing in an unreasonable faith in this case. And science without study of philosophical implications is rather shallow and cannot give a reasonable mind satisfaction (not that philosophy is satisfying).
goatlover 8y ago
But not everyone who has faith agrees with that. You have apologists, theologians, and even philosophers (more so in the past) who argue that the faith can be defended via logic and evidence. I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap. Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.
civility 8y ago
That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.
- civility 8y ago
  Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.
- FabHK 8y ago
  > The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
  - civility 8y ago
    I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - drostie 8y ago
      I mean the biggest thing was Kuhn coming along and saying "experimentally, it doesn't work that way." What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong. So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models. Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes? This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it. So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles. You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.
wl 8y ago
It's unprovable that science is the best method to arrive at truth about the universe. Remember that science attempts to come up with the best explanation for the evidence we have, often using experimentation to resolve questions. The answers are always tentative—ready to be thrown out if better ones come along. Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
  - superqwert 8y ago
    Google: faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians" So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jawns 8y ago
    I suppose that's one definition of faith, but it's not the definition I would use to describe my faith. My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
      > Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it. It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.

cyborgx7 8y ago

I've explained this to people a couple of times who make the "faith in science" argument. The difference is that you -can- verify it, not that you did verify it. Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.

balfirevic 8y ago
Another good way to frame that is to say that we have reasonable expectation (based on previous accomplishments) of scientific discoveries being true.
- srean 8y ago
  I think it would be fair to say that the goal science aspires to is "not obviously wrong". It is indeed a moving target and a tough one.
superqwert 8y ago
I think you may have a different understanding of "faith in science" than brobdingnagians. It could mean anything, such as: 1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim) 2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed) 3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology. Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
- 13415 8y ago
  Position 1 is analytically true. No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false. Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
  - Miltnoid 8y ago
    What do you mean by "analytically true"
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Basically, "analytic" = "by definition", while "synthetic" = "empirically". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction
  - superqwert 8y ago
    I would agree on position 1, but there are many different possibilities it were not true, such as if you were living in a simulation. My point 2 was not supposed to mean that current theory was wrong as much as there (most likely will) be a more accurate better theory that will replace current ones. No-one disputes that (non-Microsoft) cell phones work. The problem lies on the philosophical side - Newtonian mechanics caused a big problem in that it was quite strongly suggestive of determinism. But more underlying theories, such as QM make the situation more difficult and complex. Assuming the current or fashionable theory of the time is correct is very likely to lead to a temporary or fashionable philosophy. Position 3 - Science is an empirical study of reality - it cannot in any way explain why it is not some other reality, for example. If it is governed by logic/maths, unless every mathematical construct has physical existence (which is a rather weird and unrealistic idea), you cannot explain why this mathematical construct has existence and another does not. You may argue that other studies may be pointless, but you definitely cannot claim analytically and for certain that science can ever explain everything - so this is the point at which you are bringing in an unreasonable faith in this case. And science without study of philosophical implications is rather shallow and cannot give a reasonable mind satisfaction (not that philosophy is satisfying).

goatlover 8y ago

But not everyone who has faith agrees with that. You have apologists, theologians, and even philosophers (more so in the past) who argue that the faith can be defended via logic and evidence. I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap. Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.

civility 8y ago

That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.

civility 8y ago
Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.
FabHK 8y ago
> The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
- civility 8y ago
  I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - drostie 8y ago
    I mean the biggest thing was Kuhn coming along and saying "experimentally, it doesn't work that way." What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong. So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models. Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes? This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it. So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles. You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.

wl 8y ago

It's unprovable that science is the best method to arrive at truth about the universe. Remember that science attempts to come up with the best explanation for the evidence we have, often using experimentation to resolve questions. The answers are always tentative—ready to be thrown out if better ones come along. Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
- superqwert 8y ago
  Google: faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians" So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jawns 8y ago
  I suppose that's one definition of faith, but it's not the definition I would use to describe my faith. My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
    > Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it. It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.