Precision in language is more than using the correct philosophical terms everywhere. It is also important to use the correct terms for the domain you are discussing. Continually referring to 'truth' in the context of science, be it physics or anthropology, is incorrect. There's no such beast. Hence my quote from The Last Crusade. At the very least, you need a mapping between the philosophical terms and the scientific terms, with the proper bounds on where they disagree. And you need the experts from the other discipline to agree that the mapping is accurate. That's something that has not happened.



The vocabulary is different and I am uncomfortable with exchanging the concept of 'no room for doubt' for error bars and measurements of uncertainty. Also, the roll observations place in constraining alternate explanations is entirely missing from the discussion.

For example, one might be tempted to state that Newton's Theory of Gravity is a determinate contingent truth, as it can be falsified, fits observation (determined true?) and leaves no room for doubt. In fact, NASA used Newton's gravity to put Galileo in orbit around Jupiter after first performing a bank shot off Venus, then off Earth, then Venus again before putting it within 100 meters of its intended destination at Jupiter orbit. And yet we know Newton's Gravity is wrong. Einstein's GR has superseded Newton's Gravity. But when it did, the orbit of Jupiter was not altered and NASA was still free to use Newton's Gravity for their next trick shot out to Saturn.

And we'll not open the can of worms that is Quantum Mechanics today, which looks at all these definitions and giggles. And that's not a slight on philosophy. QM has been giggling at physicists ever since Schrodinger manged to tear himself away from his mistress long enough to write down the bloody equation.



Garbage. Let's take my statements about A.:

[quote=waffle]Australopithecus is an extinct hominid. That is not going to change. It is a hominid that lived between four and two million years ago. That is not going to change. It and humanity share an ancestor. [/quote]

A. is extinct. Lost world fantasies aside, this is not going to change. Also, given the exploration of dry land, the probability of a breeding population of A. surviving to the present day with no evidence is beyond remote. Especially considering the historic range of the species, its preferred environment and the encroachment on that environment. This was a savannah/light forest living species, not the sort of thing that could hide today.

A. is a hominid. Hominid is a broad category (family) encompassing all the living great apes (gorillas, chimps, orangutans and me) and their extinct relatives back to the most recent common ancestor. A.s inclusion in this group is based on the structure of it's hip, its knee, its teeth and certain features of its skull. These features are fixed by the fossils themselves. The morphological features for inclusion into this family are given by the set of common features of the living members of the family and is fixed by the phenotypes of the species involved. Their inclusion in the group itself is based on DNA evidence. Believe it or not, I left myself a hell of a lot of wiggle room in specifying only a family.

A. shares an ancestor with humanity. A. has a human knee. A. has a human hip. A. has a human's arched foot. A. has a toe structure that is similar to a human's, but bears a strong resemblance to a chimpanzee's as well. A. has dentation that is mostly human. All of these are fixed by the fossils of the genus A. and the morphology of humanity. You'll note that phrasing of mine, shares an ancestor. I did not say it was an ancestor. There's no evidence A. gave rise to humanity. In fact, there's good evidence it did not. But the evidence it and humanity share an ancestor is, as you might say, as close to a determinate contingent truth as one can get in anthropology and then some.

The caveats were there. Built into the statements themselves. The difference is that the caveats were encoded into the domain specific language I was using, and I was precise about it. Your knowledge of philosophy is solid, kitoba. But several of the things you have said in these two threads has led me to believe that your knowledge of evolutionary biology and anthropology is not nearly at the same level.

I think I know what's going on here. Let's run the discussion all the way back to the beginning, and start it over:

I opened this thread to discuss a two-part philosophical question: Are there people who approach science more as a faith than as a practice, and can that approach be established as illegitimate?

What makes this primarily a philosophy question rather than an empirical question is that it requires us to define science, faith and legitimacy.

It might seem as though defining science is a scientific question, but this is inaccurate. Science is not equipped for self-definition. That's why I've privileged philosophical definitions over scientific ones throughout this discussion.

There IS an empirical aspect to the question in terms of whether people can be found who fit the definitions once they are established. The easy example would have been Dawkins, in terms of someone who began life as a respected scientist, but who arguably wandered off the reservation a long time ago. But, to be honest, I thought that some of your posts in particular and possibly Steave's as well, showed leanings in that direction. The bulk of my effort in the thread has been spent, not very successfully, trying to establish where your and his philosophical commitments actually lie.

I think that was an error in approach, which may be what you have been trying to point out. The right path is to agree on our definitions first. It appeared that we all agreed on the definition of science early on, but I now think that agreement was illusionary.

There are strong non-empirical reasons for favoring my definitions, but I haven't done a good job so far of conveying those. I'll try to reorganize my reasoning and prepare a better presentation.

Science is the act of applying past observations to the present and future. We all do science.
Established Science is something else involving rigorous testing and peer review and can be broken down into disciplines ie. physics, biology ect.

It almost feels to me that you have been switching between both definitions indescriminately.

I don't think so. I don't endorse the first definition.

I define science as:


Based on prior conversations, we all do agree on the above, at least in theory.

The dispute arises from the fact that science is not the only realm of human inquiry, and the only human approach to gaining knowledge --it's merely one of the most successful, and the one that is currently dominant. However, there remains an entire universe of discourse outside of science.

Waffle says "Gene flow happens. That is a fact."

Perhaps he means But that is not what he has said, and the force of his language suggests instead a philosophical claim:

Given that this is a philosophical conversation, not a scientific one, the philosophical interpretation is the natural one, the scientific one, if meant, must be spelled out.

So why is this a philosophical conversation, not a scientific one? It is because science cannot be self-defining, because valid statements within science are empirical, therefore scientific, but determining the nature and the standards of science itself is definitional, therefore philosophical. When we enter into the scientific world, we make a philosophical choice to accept verification as the standard of validity. If we leave the scientific world, and want to retain verification as our standard, that requires an additional philosophical choice.

For instance, suppose Steave had said "I have no empirically verifiable evidence for God, therefore I have no valid reason to believe in God."

What he would have probably meant is "I have no scientific reason to believe in God" --because validity is not universally defined outside of the scientific realm. Otherwise, his line of argument would require an invisible extra premise "There are no valid reasons that are not scientific reasons." That last premise is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. There is no acceptable experiment that can verify that premise up to the standards of scientific respectability.

Is that what his language suggests? People mention facts all the time, and they are almost never things that one would consider philosophical claims about absolute truth. As far as I can tell, this happens in philosophical discussions themselves; for instance, you can find lots of mentions of "Socrates is a man" and "all men are mortal" as facts.

Yet I am not sure anybody would claim these are somehow a different kind of truth than that "gene flow happens". I am not sure if they are determinate contingent truths by your standards, since one might conceivably ponder whether immortal men could exist, or Socrates was a disguised woman, but they are called facts all the same. So why would you naturally expect Waffle to mean something further with that word?

By the way, a thought: a lot of this is set up with the premise that logical deductions are somehow a more secure type of truth than empirical ones. But ultimately, the rules are made up and there's no mathematical way to prove them consistent. Really the reason people confidently apply those rules to our universe is that inductive reasoning has found that they work for it...so I'm not sure this dichotomy is quite as critical as often stressed.

Actually, first-order logic --logic that is structurally banned from self-referential statements, can be proven consistent, as can many higher-order logics. You're thinking once again of Godel's proof that no logic strong enough to encompass all mathematics can be both complete and consistent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic



This is the point. The word "fact" can mean any number of things in natural language, and what "fact" means in a given conversation also is almost never what a trained, practicing scientist means when she uses the word "fact" within a wholly scientific context.



Scientific truths are valid within a specific, deliberately-limited, universe of discourse, which is smaller than most people realize. That universe of discourse is deliberately limited in size to make it as likely as possible that everything within it is consistent and corresponds with observed reality.

The sphere of logic is even smaller and more rigidly limited. It is wholly structural. The statements you mentioned are not considered within logic as "facts," but as premises. They are not declared true, they are assumed true. No correspondence with empirical reality is needed or implied within the realm of pure logic --the conclusions are exactly as valid as the premises, no more and no less.

However, the validity of logic as a whole is assumed by science. The power of science comes in combining the structural reach of logic with the strength of the empirical verification strategies. If you don't assume logic, you can't get science.

I'm curious as to just how small you think the reach of science is.

Large enough to contain infinities, too small to contain the universe.

I would suggest reading The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close. Infinities, like Dr. Banner and potential global catastrophies, are something science actively tries to avoid.

Also, you might want to look at From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. This is one of the gentlest introductions I've read to the actual scientific and mathematical reasoning that leads to a multiverse, a universe of universes. It also has the bonus of being based around quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, rather than string theory, neatly sidestepping empirical objections to a brane based multiverse.

Or, if you like your multiverses braney, there's always The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. This one includes all our theoretical stringy friends, open loops, closed loops, membranes and 11 dimensional spacetime.

But really, if anything, you're backwards. Science, or at least physics, works hard not to contain infinities but has been extending itself out beyond the bounds of the Universe for some time.

Are you sure you want to go with string theory? String theory really is a religion, complete with metaphysical entities and mathematical mysticism.

I've heard this said a lot, but rarely by people who actually understand the mathematics behind the theory. Introducing entities to make it possible to describe things with fewer postulates, or avoid questionable-seeming tricks like renormalization, might well be a foolish approach, or even a complete waste of time that can't be connected back to observation. But it is nothing akin to religion, any more than inventing notions like "caloric" and "momentum" were, and calling it that makes me wonder if you actually understand what ideas led to it in the first place.

Er, that was my third recommendation, and only if you want to wade into that morass. But really, the chief difficulty with string theory is not that it produces no results, but that when it does produce results, the results match Quantum Field Theory to the limits of experimental precision.

The problem with string theory is not that it is or is not a religion, nor is it the complaints leveled in the popular book Not Even Wrong. The problem isn't even the mathematics of string theory, with string theorists swiping tools from mathematics just as fast as the mathematicians forge them. The problem is that we are twenty damned years behind on the experimental side due to the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider due to Congressional infighting, kickbacks and the usual legislative tomfoolery.

But do tell, why is string theory a religion? Be specific.

Eh, don't want to get into trouble. You dangled string theory in front of me, and I fell right into the trap. I know next to nothing about it. I'll rescind my opinions on it.

I'm in broad agreement with you, but I have a few nitpicks:



Australopithecus is a genus, not a species, and ocucpied a variety of environments - especially if Australopithecus includes those species tht are more commonly classified as Paranthropus nowadays. Even with a more limited definition, isotopic analysis of specimens classed in only one species, A. afarensis, indicate that it occupied dense woodland as well as savannah. There are certainly varieties of australopithecine we know nothing about and, due to preservation issues, species dwelling deep in the rainforest are less likely to be known to us. Given that, in 2008, an unknown population of approximately 125,000 Gorilla gorilla were discovered in the Congo - more than the entire known population of the species up till that point - the idea of a small, cryptic hominid species surviving somewhere in the rainforest is less extravagant than you make out.



No molecular studies of Australopithecine DNA have been done - DNA doesn't survive that well. It's placement as a hominid is purely on morphological grounds. Molecular studies of some species have completely reworked our understanding of phylogeny, and some species, genera and families have found themselves transplanted to wholly different parts of the tree of life then where they were commonly believed to reside. As a prime example, it has been suggested in recent years that falcons do not belong with hawks and other raptors - despite the clear similarities, but should be put completely elsewhere near to passerines on the bird family tree. I think the idea has fallen out of favour, but such dramatic realignments do happen. We can imagine some scenario in which Australopithecus was an example of extensive convergent evolution, and in fact was the sister group to Homonidae - though this is much less likely than the idea of a population knocking about the Congo.

Nitpick's aside, kitoba's taking his point to a ludicrous extreme. He is demanding caveats in certain cases, whilst quite happily refusing to use equally significant caveats in others. When discussing what waffles said, I didn't see him pointing out that he was assuming waffle's account wasn't being used by another; nor that he was assuming he had actually read those words and wasn't suffering from some bizarre hallucination; nor that he was assuming that waffles was a real person and the whole Sluggy board wasn't some devious trick set up to play games with him or - alternatively - that for the purpose of this discussion 'waffles wrote' means the words that appear on his screen next to the user name 'waffles', regardless of the actual origin of those words etc. etc.

All these caveats are implicit and don't need to be stated, or conversation rapidly descends into an impossible task. I think the same applies with statements like 'gene flow happens' and 'Australopithecus is an extinct hominid',

In order to demonstrate the urgent need for such caveats, I demand a debate between Kahzmic and... shoot... some of the other participants in the now-lost-to-the-sands-of-time epic poem The WGARSland. Is that really completely gone? Maybe we could substitute Kitoba.