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Could you please elaborate on why you insist that the word has no use? There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. N

Could you please elaborate on why you insist that the word has no use? There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. Not using the word fact for the latter is useless pageantry if the "well, technically..." kind. The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. This ability is very interesting from a bayesian perspective. It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met. Before the scientific revolution, facts like this used to be fairly trivial: The ground and the sky exist. That kind of stuff. The enormous explosion of facts like this is a unique thing to our historical period. To forgot the obvious natural word for this serves one purpose: It makes communicating scientific insight harder.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided. In the original sense of the word, we still don't know whether there are atoms. > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met. Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says, not whether the words in the book are true. Likewise, performing an experiment over and over again only gives you evidence about what the experiment does, not any models that generalise its results (beyond the marginal, diminishing-returns "we're pretty sure this experiment's results match up"). Nothing is ever beyond doubt; only beyond reasonable doubt.
- matheusd 4y ago
  > Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided Those are two different facts: 1. Atoms exist 2. Atoms can be divided GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics". >> > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. > Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says "Generate additional evidence at will" is packing a lot of stuff, but in my read it means "Generate a hypothesis", "Model a new experiment that can disprove it to the desired or available precision", "Review the experimental setup for any defects", etc etc. "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist. The only way I see out of that is if you're _so_ reductionist to the point where you accept that the _only_ thing that exists is whatever is at the lowest level of reality (quantum fields, quantum foam, whatever), but then I guess neither you nor I exist to be discussing this.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    > "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist. You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. A new experiment you design and perform might not be compatible with the existence of atoms; that's the whole point of running experiments! (Of course, I have the same prediction; the proton-neutron-electron theory of atoms seems like a pretty solid one, at this point.) Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something, there is no finite amount of evidence that'll convince you otherwise. (Of course, humans aren't ideal Bayesian reasoners; you can usually provide enough evidence to convince a certain person otherwise, if they are actually wrong.)
    - matheusd 4y ago
      > You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. I was being concrete about atoms, in particular, not about what gets named as a "scientific fact" in general. Yes, in general you don't reach that threshold of being able to produce a stream of evidence that is always compatible to a theory, and you should not call that theory a fact (I also pointed that out on a different message). However for the existence of atoms, specifically, I do believe we have reached this level. > Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something I don't literally believe with 100% certainty that atoms exist (because I may as well be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating my entire universe). I say there will never come a time when we'll disprove the existence of atoms (at their level of abstraction).
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    > Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There's a word for this, as I think it's fair to say any evidence of atoms still takes some inference and isn't a direct observation. The word is theory [1]. That is why we refer to the idea that matter is made of atoms as 'atomic theory', Gould: "facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
ImHereToVote 4y ago
"Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it" Not everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Hell, even those that can, can't perform an experiment to verify it. Maybe you just imagined that you performed the experiment.
- Certhas 4y ago
  This is the prime example of a vacuously true but completely useless statement. It's exactly equivalent to the toddler's insight that you can always ask another why. Yes you can always ask "but how do you know?". But so what? What does that teach you about the nature of our knowledge of the world? Nothing of substance.
matheusd 4y ago
This is an excellent comment! And this is a *very* strong threshold to reach: > No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met. I'm fearful of mentioning any specific current scientific controversy, but it seems to me that many of the current politically charged topics fail to meet this very strong threshold. I guess I'm thanking you because while I had an intuitive sense for this, I didn't know this specific wording of "you can meet any threshold for evidence".
- kuhewa 4y ago
  I think the relevant wording here is "problem of induction". You can generate evidence at will and meetn any threshold of evidence for the statement "all swans are white". Anyone can perform the experiment by traveling around the northern hemisphere and find millions of white swans. It would still be silly to call that statement a fact, because it only requires a single swan sighting in Australia to falsify it.
  - matheusd 4y ago
    You cannot "generate evidence at will to meet any threshold of evidence" for this specific example ("all swans are white") because, unless you posit that there are swans in Kepler-422B, I can set my threshold of evidence to "we have turned the earth into computronium and have not found any non-white swans", which is a finite (albeit large) threshold. Once we agree on whatever definition of "swan" we care about (an animal belonging to a specific phylogenetic branch, with such and such qualities) we can agree on a more reasonable threshold, one that should include a visit to Australia to be crossed.
    - kuhewa 4y ago
      The problem of induction always applies. You also can't examine every bit of matter in the universe to ensure it is made of atoms.
n4r9 4y ago
The atomic model is certainly beyond a significant level of doubt. Surely it is not totally beyond question however. There remains a very small chance that an alternative model of the universe is consistent with the experiments you have in mind, and better explains the outcomes of other (as yet unperformed) experiments.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  A good but not perfect example would be Newtonian gravitation. Pre-relativity, if it wasn't for the weird precession of the perihelion of Mercury, one could have easily used a form of this argument to claim Newtonian gravity is a fact because you can do an experiment at any moment to demonstrate it by watching an apple fall from a tree. It's been done millions of times, and the acceleration always follows an elegant equation! We can't always know what we don't know, so falsifiability must remain on the table.
  - raattgift 4y ago
    From the early modern discovery of the finite speed of light in the 17th century (postdating and motivated by the discovery of the Galilean moons). From the beginning (about a decade after Rømer and Huygens published their measurements) Newtonian gravitation was on difficult mathematical grounds because the optical image of a source of gravitation (e.g. the Jovian system and its elements) must lag behind its (Newtonian) gravitational source. Indeed these problems drove corpuscular theories of light, including Newton's own, in which perfectly elastic, rigid, and weightless projectiles travel with finite speed from a source to a target. Early 18th century work on the aberration of light evidenced some of the theoretical problems in Newtonian gravitation (and relatedly interference and diffraction exposed problems in corpuscular theories of light), but almost no practical ones. The practically-measurable non-Newtonian nature of the perihelion precession of Mercury wasn't discovered until at least a couple of decades after Newtonian gravitation exposed the existence of Neptune. For all practical purposes light as a source of gravitational potential (much less the self-gravitation of light) still isn't something we can demonstrate in an Earthbound laboratory (there is ample astrophysical and cosmological support for the active gravitational mass of light, though). Tl;dr Newtonian gravitation was unphysical at its inception, and Newton understood this in correspondence exploring mechanical explanations for the inverse square law. Penultimately, a direct laboratory test of Newtonian gravitation wasn't made until Cavendish's experiment in 1798. Was it "fact" or "effective theory" prior to that test? Did it become "fact" at the time of the test, or did it remain an effective theory? I'm not sure the distinction matters in any practical sense. Finally, > demonstrate [Newtonian gravitation] by watching an apple fall from a tree. Try that in a strong wind!
kuhewa 4y ago
> The ground and the sky exist. Those are directly observable. "Fact" stands in for an "observation", or maybe a repeated/repeatable, perhaps standardized, observation. (The sky is really just the way the atmosphere appears from a certain vantage point, so if you really drill down I'm not sure what saying sky itself exists actually entails, but I digress). > Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Sure! But in the modern scientific paradigm the purpose of that experiment would be an attempt at falsification. This is absolutely critical to the underpinnings of science — anything that is inferred from observations could be falsified at any time, so it doesn't really make sense to allow a secondary inference — a hypothesis or theory — to be linguistically elevated to fact, which most people would take to mean something that is concretely true. I can understand using fact to refer to a primary observation, which is where fact seems a natural word. I'd still argue that observation is a more apt word, especially as they often involve instrumentation or cognitive bias and are rather subject to change. I'm not expecting atomic theory to be falsified anytime soon, don't get me wrong. But in only slightly less edge cases, like round vs flat earth or evolution vs creationism, terming the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt consensus a fact isn't doing any work. Either we agree, at which point it isn't really necessary anyway, or we don't agree, because someone in that collective we is a flat earther or creationist or similar, at which point just using the word fact isn't going to convince them anyway. > It makes communicating scientific insight harder. On less epistemological grounds and more pragmatically... I do a bit of sci comm of my primary research, some public facing research and outreach and have also spent plenty of time arguing scientific consensus topics on the internet with people who may or may not see them as such. Anecdotally, most of the time I see the word fact being bandied in the context we are discussing here it is used as a cheap stand-in for where some actual evidence or at least evidence of scientific consensus should have been. (Quite often it is invoked in an attempt to shore up something on shakier foundation or for which the invoker just isn't that well versed in and may not be correct about.) Just not doing much work. Take the atomic theory example — to teach it the first time, depending on the age group you would just describe atoms, without ever needing to stop to call them factual, or you would provide historical experimental and other evidence of the existence of atoms and why they are a useful model for physics and chemistry. The word fact isn't necessary. If atom truthers emerge and you are trying to convince an undecided or torn public that they really do exist despite what the YouTube videos say, the word fact isn't going to help.
yawboakye 4y ago
historically, i.e. speaking philosophically, only things known a priori can be considered facts. if the knowledge is arrived at by experiment, we have to defer to the quality of our senses (or the senses of our measuring instruments). not feeling the heat (or our measuring instruments not picking them up) doesn't mean heat is produced by certain activities. seen this way, what you'd call facts after rigorous experiments is essentially the perspective of the observer and the quality of our measuring tools at this point in time. as both improve, new facts will be observed. then what happens to the old fact? no longer facts? if so, why were they called facts to begin with? the word fact derives from the latin factum. immutability is conferred since factum implies that the event has been sealed by time. if it's bound to change, let's call it something else, shall we?
naasking 4y ago
> There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. The latter could be the empty set, and no argument I've seen has conclusively proven that it's inhabited. Solipsism is the ultimate refuge from the claim that there are things beyond doubt. All you can do is make the contingency of facts explicit, like, "given the assumption of an external world to our minds, atoms exist".

wizzwizz4 4y ago

> The existence of atoms is not merely probable, after millenia of debate the question is settled. Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided. In the original sense of the word, we still don't know whether there are atoms. > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met. Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says, not whether the words in the book are true. Likewise, performing an experiment over and over again only gives you evidence about what the experiment does, not any models that generalise its results (beyond the marginal, diminishing-returns "we're pretty sure this experiment's results match up"). Nothing is ever beyond doubt; only beyond reasonable doubt.

matheusd 4y ago
> Except atoms aren't atomic: they can be further subdivided Those are two different facts: 1. Atoms exist 2. Atoms can be divided GP was attesting to #1 being a scientific fact for which "no matter your threshold for evidence needed, it can be met". If you object to the word "atoms" on the grounds of it having a specific meaning from 2K years ago, replace that with "the modern standard model of particle physics". >> > It means we have a statement for which we can generate additional evidence at will. > Reading the same book over and over again only gives you evidence about what the book says "Generate additional evidence at will" is packing a lot of stuff, but in my read it means "Generate a hypothesis", "Model a new experiment that can disprove it to the desired or available precision", "Review the experimental setup for any defects", etc etc. "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist. The only way I see out of that is if you're _so_ reductionist to the point where you accept that the _only_ thing that exists is whatever is at the lowest level of reality (quantum fields, quantum foam, whatever), but then I guess neither you nor I exist to be discussing this.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > "Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There is no evidence whatsoever that atoms (at their "level of abstraction") do not exist. You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. A new experiment you design and perform might not be compatible with the existence of atoms; that's the whole point of running experiments! (Of course, I have the same prediction; the proton-neutron-electron theory of atoms seems like a pretty solid one, at this point.) Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something, there is no finite amount of evidence that'll convince you otherwise. (Of course, humans aren't ideal Bayesian reasoners; you can usually provide enough evidence to convince a certain person otherwise, if they are actually wrong.)
  - matheusd 4y ago
    > You're describing certainty. This is a prediction, not reality. I was being concrete about atoms, in particular, not about what gets named as a "scientific fact" in general. Yes, in general you don't reach that threshold of being able to produce a stream of evidence that is always compatible to a theory, and you should not call that theory a fact (I also pointed that out on a different message). However for the existence of atoms, specifically, I do believe we have reached this level. > Certainty does have interesting properties, from a Bayesian perspective: if you are certain of something I don't literally believe with 100% certainty that atoms exist (because I may as well be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating my entire universe). I say there will never come a time when we'll disprove the existence of atoms (at their level of abstraction).
- kuhewa 4y ago
  > Generate additional evidence at will" when applied to the "scientific fact that atoms exist" means that any new experiment that you design and perform will be compatible to that fact. There's a word for this, as I think it's fair to say any evidence of atoms still takes some inference and isn't a direct observation. The word is theory [1]. That is why we refer to the idea that matter is made of atoms as 'atomic theory', Gould: "facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

ImHereToVote 4y ago

"Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it" Not everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Hell, even those that can, can't perform an experiment to verify it. Maybe you just imagined that you performed the experiment.

Certhas 4y ago
This is the prime example of a vacuously true but completely useless statement. It's exactly equivalent to the toddler's insight that you can always ask another why. Yes you can always ask "but how do you know?". But so what? What does that teach you about the nature of our knowledge of the world? Nothing of substance.

matheusd 4y ago

This is an excellent comment! And this is a *very* strong threshold to reach: > No matter what your threshold for evidence needed is, it can be met. I'm fearful of mentioning any specific current scientific controversy, but it seems to me that many of the current politically charged topics fail to meet this very strong threshold. I guess I'm thanking you because while I had an intuitive sense for this, I didn't know this specific wording of "you can meet any threshold for evidence".

kuhewa 4y ago
I think the relevant wording here is "problem of induction". You can generate evidence at will and meetn any threshold of evidence for the statement "all swans are white". Anyone can perform the experiment by traveling around the northern hemisphere and find millions of white swans. It would still be silly to call that statement a fact, because it only requires a single swan sighting in Australia to falsify it.
- matheusd 4y ago
  You cannot "generate evidence at will to meet any threshold of evidence" for this specific example ("all swans are white") because, unless you posit that there are swans in Kepler-422B, I can set my threshold of evidence to "we have turned the earth into computronium and have not found any non-white swans", which is a finite (albeit large) threshold. Once we agree on whatever definition of "swan" we care about (an animal belonging to a specific phylogenetic branch, with such and such qualities) we can agree on a more reasonable threshold, one that should include a visit to Australia to be crossed.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    The problem of induction always applies. You also can't examine every bit of matter in the universe to ensure it is made of atoms.

n4r9 4y ago

The atomic model is certainly beyond a significant level of doubt. Surely it is not totally beyond question however. There remains a very small chance that an alternative model of the universe is consistent with the experiments you have in mind, and better explains the outcomes of other (as yet unperformed) experiments.

kuhewa 4y ago
A good but not perfect example would be Newtonian gravitation. Pre-relativity, if it wasn't for the weird precession of the perihelion of Mercury, one could have easily used a form of this argument to claim Newtonian gravity is a fact because you can do an experiment at any moment to demonstrate it by watching an apple fall from a tree. It's been done millions of times, and the acceleration always follows an elegant equation! We can't always know what we don't know, so falsifiability must remain on the table.
- raattgift 4y ago
  From the early modern discovery of the finite speed of light in the 17th century (postdating and motivated by the discovery of the Galilean moons). From the beginning (about a decade after Rømer and Huygens published their measurements) Newtonian gravitation was on difficult mathematical grounds because the optical image of a source of gravitation (e.g. the Jovian system and its elements) must lag behind its (Newtonian) gravitational source. Indeed these problems drove corpuscular theories of light, including Newton's own, in which perfectly elastic, rigid, and weightless projectiles travel with finite speed from a source to a target. Early 18th century work on the aberration of light evidenced some of the theoretical problems in Newtonian gravitation (and relatedly interference and diffraction exposed problems in corpuscular theories of light), but almost no practical ones. The practically-measurable non-Newtonian nature of the perihelion precession of Mercury wasn't discovered until at least a couple of decades after Newtonian gravitation exposed the existence of Neptune. For all practical purposes light as a source of gravitational potential (much less the self-gravitation of light) still isn't something we can demonstrate in an Earthbound laboratory (there is ample astrophysical and cosmological support for the active gravitational mass of light, though). Tl;dr Newtonian gravitation was unphysical at its inception, and Newton understood this in correspondence exploring mechanical explanations for the inverse square law. Penultimately, a direct laboratory test of Newtonian gravitation wasn't made until Cavendish's experiment in 1798. Was it "fact" or "effective theory" prior to that test? Did it become "fact" at the time of the test, or did it remain an effective theory? I'm not sure the distinction matters in any practical sense. Finally, > demonstrate [Newtonian gravitation] by watching an apple fall from a tree. Try that in a strong wind!

kuhewa 4y ago

> The ground and the sky exist. Those are directly observable. "Fact" stands in for an "observation", or maybe a repeated/repeatable, perhaps standardized, observation. (The sky is really just the way the atmosphere appears from a certain vantage point, so if you really drill down I'm not sure what saying sky itself exists actually entails, but I digress). > Everyone can perform an experiment to verify it. Sure! But in the modern scientific paradigm the purpose of that experiment would be an attempt at falsification. This is absolutely critical to the underpinnings of science — anything that is inferred from observations could be falsified at any time, so it doesn't really make sense to allow a secondary inference — a hypothesis or theory — to be linguistically elevated to fact, which most people would take to mean something that is concretely true. I can understand using fact to refer to a primary observation, which is where fact seems a natural word. I'd still argue that observation is a more apt word, especially as they often involve instrumentation or cognitive bias and are rather subject to change. I'm not expecting atomic theory to be falsified anytime soon, don't get me wrong. But in only slightly less edge cases, like round vs flat earth or evolution vs creationism, terming the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt consensus a fact isn't doing any work. Either we agree, at which point it isn't really necessary anyway, or we don't agree, because someone in that collective we is a flat earther or creationist or similar, at which point just using the word fact isn't going to convince them anyway. > It makes communicating scientific insight harder. On less epistemological grounds and more pragmatically... I do a bit of sci comm of my primary research, some public facing research and outreach and have also spent plenty of time arguing scientific consensus topics on the internet with people who may or may not see them as such. Anecdotally, most of the time I see the word fact being bandied in the context we are discussing here it is used as a cheap stand-in for where some actual evidence or at least evidence of scientific consensus should have been. (Quite often it is invoked in an attempt to shore up something on shakier foundation or for which the invoker just isn't that well versed in and may not be correct about.) Just not doing much work. Take the atomic theory example — to teach it the first time, depending on the age group you would just describe atoms, without ever needing to stop to call them factual, or you would provide historical experimental and other evidence of the existence of atoms and why they are a useful model for physics and chemistry. The word fact isn't necessary. If atom truthers emerge and you are trying to convince an undecided or torn public that they really do exist despite what the YouTube videos say, the word fact isn't going to help.

yawboakye 4y ago

historically, i.e. speaking philosophically, only things known a priori can be considered facts. if the knowledge is arrived at by experiment, we have to defer to the quality of our senses (or the senses of our measuring instruments). not feeling the heat (or our measuring instruments not picking them up) doesn't mean heat is produced by certain activities. seen this way, what you'd call facts after rigorous experiments is essentially the perspective of the observer and the quality of our measuring tools at this point in time. as both improve, new facts will be observed. then what happens to the old fact? no longer facts? if so, why were they called facts to begin with? the word fact derives from the latin factum. immutability is conferred since factum implies that the event has been sealed by time. if it's bound to change, let's call it something else, shall we?

naasking 4y ago

> There are things that are merely probable, and there are things that are beyond doubt. The latter could be the empty set, and no argument I've seen has conclusively proven that it's inhabited. Solipsism is the ultimate refuge from the claim that there are things beyond doubt. All you can do is make the contingency of facts explicit, like, "given the assumption of an external world to our minds, atoms exist".