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There is no parallel between scientific knowledge and whatever you're calling "cultural truths". To the extent that there is lasting progress in culture, it is

by feoren 3y ago

There is no parallel between scientific knowledge and whatever you're calling "cultural truths". To the extent that there is lasting progress in culture, it is through art, music, and literature, not through "truth". Truth is the realm of science alone. Yadda-yadda genital mutilation: that is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty, and science can indeed show that, by showing that it causes health problems, causes pain even in babies, brings none of the claimed benefits, etc. Most of the old-hat cultural-relativism arguments come down to plain-old scientific ignorance, just as if there were cultures out there that still believed the Earth is flat. Those are not "cultural truths", they are scientific ignorance. > "trust, but verify" We're talking about the collective knowledge and understanding of all of humanity. How are you going to verify for yourself the value of the Planck constant and the exact curvature of the Earth and the exact age of the Universe? Are you going to build your own $50-billion particle accelerator to verify the existence and strength of the Higgs field? Through decades of study you may get to the point where you can indeed verify one of the millions of foundational truths that we build further knowledge upon. "Trust, but verify" doesn't belong here. You should not "trust", nor can you possibly "verify". It's more like "understand". These truths must fit together cohesively, or if they don't, it should be glaring unsolved problem (e.g. gravity vs. quantum mechanics). Test new ideas against the rest of the theory to relentlessly look for contradictions or poor fits. Develop your mental model. You never need to really "trust"; everything has a wrongness error-bar around it. The wrongness error-bar of the shape of the Earth is very small; it includes subtle corrections due to slight variations in the gravitational field and the pull of other bodies, but it does not include a flat Earth.

karaterobot 3y ago
> that is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty Being ignorant and cruel does not make something separate from culture. Many things in culture are ignorant and cruel. Being demonstrably unhealthy and without benefit is also tangential to being part of culture. Even science is not separate from culture: science has a culture, with its own biases, as has been shown many times. > Truth is the realm of science alone. That's interesting. Mathematicians might say truth is the realm of mathematics alone. Philosophers might say they claim it, or nobody does. I think you just have to define what you mean by truth (is it eternal and unchanging?), and once you do that, you open the doors to a lot of other reasonable claimants. This is not an argument for relativism, this is me saying there are different kinds of truth, not that there is no such thing as truth, or that there is no such thing as falsity.
- feoren 3y ago
  [dead]
nemo 3y ago
>Truth is the realm of science alone. This statement isn't a scientifically based statement nor could it be one since science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims - your claim can't be true by your own standard.
- feoren 3y ago
  HN comments are small and my comments are limited by the amount of procrastination my day is able to endure. "Truth is the realm of science alone" is a lot of things significantly abbreviated into a pithy and over-simplified HN comment. You could levy the same criticism at almost everything anyone ever says on an internet forum, including "scientifically based statement" (whatever that means) and "science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims". I'm asserting that the only useful definition of the word "truth", and the core of the definition that almost everyone is actually grasping at when they talk about "truth", is the particular kind of truth that science seeks, and any other definition of "truth" inevitably leads to statements that would be "true" under that definition but clearly nonsensical. Basically if you want "truth" to act "truthy" in all the ways we expect "truth" to behave, then your definition of "truth" is exactly the one that is sought by science and nothing else (here I am including mathematics as a branch of science, even though it's probably better to think of it the other way around). Here's my definition of truth: the body of statements which are self-consistent with some set of pre-selected axioms. A false statement is one which is inconsistent with those axioms. Plenty of statements are neither (e.g. "this statement is false"). You claim this is not a "scientifically based statement", but really it's just a definition, plus an assertion that other definitions are not useful. The latter is actually falsifiable: show me a useful definition of "truth" that doesn't reduce to this definition. Of course I haven't given you the exact criteria for doing this nor evidence that my assertion is correct, but this is an HN comment; what do you really expect? > science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims I don't see why that should be true. I can claim to have certain knowledge and science can test me on those claims. If your definition of "epistemological claims" only includes those philosophy-ejaculate sentences that cannot be tested by science, then your definition is useless and boring.
  - nemo 3y ago

by feoren 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago

> that is not culture, it's ignorant cruelty Being ignorant and cruel does not make something separate from culture. Many things in culture are ignorant and cruel. Being demonstrably unhealthy and without benefit is also tangential to being part of culture. Even science is not separate from culture: science has a culture, with its own biases, as has been shown many times. > Truth is the realm of science alone. That's interesting. Mathematicians might say truth is the realm of mathematics alone. Philosophers might say they claim it, or nobody does. I think you just have to define what you mean by truth (is it eternal and unchanging?), and once you do that, you open the doors to a lot of other reasonable claimants. This is not an argument for relativism, this is me saying there are different kinds of truth, not that there is no such thing as truth, or that there is no such thing as falsity.

feoren 3y ago
[dead]

nemo 3y ago

>Truth is the realm of science alone. This statement isn't a scientifically based statement nor could it be one since science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims - your claim can't be true by your own standard.

feoren 3y ago
HN comments are small and my comments are limited by the amount of procrastination my day is able to endure. "Truth is the realm of science alone" is a lot of things significantly abbreviated into a pithy and over-simplified HN comment. You could levy the same criticism at almost everything anyone ever says on an internet forum, including "scientifically based statement" (whatever that means) and "science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims". I'm asserting that the only useful definition of the word "truth", and the core of the definition that almost everyone is actually grasping at when they talk about "truth", is the particular kind of truth that science seeks, and any other definition of "truth" inevitably leads to statements that would be "true" under that definition but clearly nonsensical. Basically if you want "truth" to act "truthy" in all the ways we expect "truth" to behave, then your definition of "truth" is exactly the one that is sought by science and nothing else (here I am including mathematics as a branch of science, even though it's probably better to think of it the other way around). Here's my definition of truth: the body of statements which are self-consistent with some set of pre-selected axioms. A false statement is one which is inconsistent with those axioms. Plenty of statements are neither (e.g. "this statement is false"). You claim this is not a "scientifically based statement", but really it's just a definition, plus an assertion that other definitions are not useful. The latter is actually falsifiable: show me a useful definition of "truth" that doesn't reduce to this definition. Of course I haven't given you the exact criteria for doing this nor evidence that my assertion is correct, but this is an HN comment; what do you really expect? > science can't measure the truth-value of epistemological claims I don't see why that should be true. I can claim to have certain knowledge and science can test me on those claims. If your definition of "epistemological claims" only includes those philosophy-ejaculate sentences that cannot be tested by science, then your definition is useless and boring.
- nemo 3y ago