Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

[Carl-Richard]

Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?:

1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".

2. "There is no absolute truth; true or false is always relative to someone's perspective, it's just a preference to believe certain things".

3. "Physical reality is a social and linguistic construct".

4. "The science of one society is no more valid than that of another".

[Osaid]

28 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".

The conclusion is correct, but there is more to scientific knowledge than just social forces and the aformentioned. Scientific knowledge is the product of knowledge. Science != scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is based on science but it is not science, it is an abstraction of science.

28 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

2. "There is no absolute truth; true or false is always relative to someone's perspective, it's just a preference to believe certain things".

This is a paradox because you are claiming an absolute truth, which is that there is no absolute truth. So the statement is misguided and loops in on itself.

The paradox is created because of a failure to realize that "true" and "false" do not exist in experience, they are just abstracted thought forms which only exist as knowledge. 

28 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

3. "Physical reality is a social and linguistic construct".

No, this statement doesn't capture the entirety of it. It can be more. It can be based on memory. It's definitely a mental construct though, in all cases.

28 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

4. "The science of one society is no more valid than that of another".

Maybe. Depends on what the criteria is. This statement cannot be validated objectively, because "validity" does not exist as experience. Valid meaning what? Where is it being applied? It won't be valid in the dream state. It might be valid in the waking state. Or it might even be useless in the waking state. Depends.

Edited September 3, 2023 by Osaid

[Phil King]

18 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

"Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".

I would disagree. Wouldnt just simple observation of the natural world aid in the construction of scientific knowledge? Like if i planted two tree saplings and used water on one of them and mountain dew on the other, I would be able to see what fluid is best for growing trees.

 

20 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

"There is no absolute truth; true or false is always relative to someone's perspective, it's just a preference to believe certain things".

I would partially disagree. I have become directly conscious of Absolute Truth, though in an everyday life perspective truth is always relative to someones experiences and beliefs

 

21 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

"Physical reality is a social and linguistic construct".

interesting. I am inclined to agree. We are only able to refer to reality through language and there isnt a true material bottom to reality.

 

23 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The science of one society is no more valid than that of another

I would probably disagree to this one. If one societies science can produce more consistent results and theories, than it is more valid. Like western materialist science is probably more valid than a remote islands idea of "science" like early forms of shamanism or voodoo or magick

[Carl-Richard]

So this is from a book chapter I'm reading in philosophy of science that the author; while trying present the views of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos; took the time to give his own personal take on why so-called "extreme forms" of relativism are rationally unfounded or logically inconsistent (the four points above were examples of those views). It reminds me of a similar book I read 3 years ago at the beginning of my studies where the author inbetween presenting different views on ethics and morality, had to give his own personal take on why morality is necessarily objective. Then, like now, I felt like closing my ears while reading it. I also find it funny that the first author essentially disagrees with the second author by clarifying that he is exclusively talking about epistemic relativism and not moral relativism (implying that the former is less defensible).

As for my own personal opinion, I feel the objectivist/relativist or realist/anti-realist dichotomy is basically just about choosing the language game that you think emphasises what is most important. For me, I think emphasising that all truths depend on some aspect of ourselves, our constructions and thus deceptions, is more important than emphasising the fact that there seems to be a through consistency behind some of these constructions. For example, to call our scientific models "useful fictions" as opposed to "corroborated theories pointing at truth" helps to remind me of the fact that we're always a part of the picture and that you won't make that go away no matter how many logical contradictions you want to ascribe to some of the contigency of that way of thinking.

In general, I feel that people's different language games become less and less appealing, even the ones I've been more fond of the last couple of years (like Bernardo Kastrup's "Analytical Idealism"), because I see the point in all of them, and none of them are exclusively "right". Simultaneously, I find it increasingly harder to follow what a single author even means by what they're saying, as there are so many different ways of interpreting words like "truth", "relative", "objective", etc., depending on the context and the background knowledge of the author. In one sense, it's freeing and simplifying, but in another sense it's disorienting and complexifying. Sometimes, I think back to when things were simpler and smaller, and how I felt I could understand things for certain (while sometimes running into a wall of "these people are just wrong", which I now probably understand as "this is complex").

To do a callback to Spiral Dynamics, I think this is what true "Green aperspectival madness" feels like (or aspects of it). It's one thing to grasp it conceptually, but it's another to live through it.

Anyways, I did want to engage more directly with you guys' responses, but I had to get this off my chest first, and now it's super late, so I'll maybe get to that tomorrow

Edited September 5, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[DocWatts]

On 9/3/2023 at 6:08 PM, Carl-Richard said:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?:

1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".

I'll just respond to the first one for now, since it seems to be a good encapsulation of the problems that I see with this author's take on science.

Seems to me this is an instance of taking a partial truth (that scientific knowledge is of course intertwined with power politics and the peculiarities of culture), and absolutizing it.

From these statements, I get the sense that the author is taking a postmodern framework and applying some of its valid insights in a very un-nuanced way.

If the natural world played no role in scientific knowledge, science wouldn't work. If cultural preferences take you too far away from the natural world, it begins to obstruct the ability to do science. The fact that Nazi ideology considered much of the 20th century advances in physics as illegitimate 'jewish science' goes a long way in explaining why they were never able to develop atomic weapons.

Additionally, the author seems to be fundamentally confused about what a Construct is. A Construct is simply a category or boundary that our minds create and sustain, that’s coupled to some observation about ourselves or our world.  While Constructs can of of course can vary in the degree of validity that they have, just because something is Constructed doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's arbitrary or 'imaginary'.

For instance, gender is of course socially constructed, but it's real in the sense that it has a profound influence on individuals and societies. It's tied to something real in that it's how biological sex gets expressed in individuals and cultures.

Edited September 5, 2023 by DocWatts

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, DocWatts said:

I'll just respond to the first one for now, since it seems to be a good encapsulation of the problems that I see with this author's take on science.

Seems to me this is an instance of taking a partial truth (that scientific knowledge is of course intertwined with power politics and the peculiarities of culture), and absolutizing it.

From these statements, I get the sense that the author is taking a postmodern framework and applying some of its valid insights in a very un-nuanced way.

If you read my elaboration above, the author was actually presenting arguments for why the bolded statements are unreasonable. My problem with him was not his arguments per se, but his overall conclusion (i.e. that you should adopt a realist language game: "theories are pointing at truth!"). My frustration is partially that I feel less and less that there is just one true way to talk about things, but also that I value the relativist language game a bit more. I do like to think of theories as "useful fictions", because it keeps our feet to the fire of the truth that we're inextricably intertwined with our theories, and the alternative makes you more prone to the worst kinds of self-deception.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[DocWatts]

20 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

If you read my elaboration above, the author was actually presenting arguments for why the bolded statements are unreasonable. My problem with him was not his arguments per se, but his overall conclusion (i.e. that you should adopt a realist language game: "theories are pointing at truth!"). My frustration is partially that I feel less and less that there is just one true way to talk about things, but also that I value the relativist language game a bit more. 

Thanks for the clarification! For my part, I find it highly useful to tie considerations of 'truth' to a purposive context. Which is to say, that truth is always truth for someone, and that it has an intersubjective component to it. The most valid truths are the ones that hold true for many different intersubjective perspectives, and are stable across many different types of contexts. Additionally, physical and biological laws place bounds on what can be subjectively true for a given observer. No amount of subjective conviction will let someone walk on the ceiling, or allow someone to arrange a successful human society around emulating the behavior patterns of bees.

My own frustrations with extreme forms of relativism is when that paradigm conflates the intersubjective component of truth with arbitrariness . Certainly arbitrariness can be an aspect of how dominator hierarchies construct a weaponized version of 'The Truth', but that's a very partial understanding of how truth is constructed. To me, this seems like another instance of the 'performative contradiction' of postmodernism, since I have trouble believing that folks who argue thier relativist position with conviction believe that their own views aren't any better or worse than the dominator hierarchies they detest.

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by DocWatts

[Sincerity]

On 9/4/2023 at 0:08 AM, Carl-Richard said:

1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge".

Agree and disagree. Reality has nothing in common with any knowledge of it. The latter is all construct. And yet I think there is "better" and "worse" knowledge/understanding. The world does have a "role" in the construction of knowledge - after all, understanding is based ON the world! All knowledge is relative to IT.

On 9/4/2023 at 0:08 AM, Carl-Richard said:

2. "There is no absolute truth; true or false is always relative to someone's perspective, it's just a preference to believe certain things".

Disagree. Of course there is absolute truth. THIS, NOW.

But if we're talking about knowledge about the world... yeah, just perspective.

On 9/4/2023 at 0:08 AM, Carl-Richard said:

3. "Physical reality is a social and linguistic construct".

I'm not sure what's implied by physical reality. Physics is consciousness.

It is "an objective reality outside of ourselves"? Then I agree, that's a construct and there is no reality to that. Is it PHYSICAL REALITY, RIGHT NOW? Then I disagree.

On 9/4/2023 at 0:08 AM, Carl-Richard said:

4. "The science of one society is no more valid than that of another".

Agree and disagree. See answer to question #1. There is better and worse science (I think), and yet they're all equally invalid.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Sincerity