Say Anything Blog

Sparkie, to start with I’ve read Thomas Kuhn.  In fact I have his book on the philosophy of science (read it as part of my undergraduate curriculum).  It’s rather an embarrasing work to be frank, completely full of scientific misunderstandings as well as showing an ignorance to how science itself works… Nevertheless:

When we use objective in the scientific sense pertains to observable phenomena. That has nothing to do with whether scientists as individuals manage to remain objective in their endeavors.  An objective truth is not one that people can embrace without their personal predilections getting in the way, then, it is one that can be rediscovered by other people via some measurement process.

Secondly all you have to do is open your eyes to see that over time, we discover more truth than we knew before.  We don’t still live in caves with fire, or have horses draw our carriages, etc.  The advancement of technology is a very quantitative metric of the fact that the scientific process advances our understanding of a very real and absolute universe.  Really this is such an obvious point (you don’t still wear caveman cloths do you?) that I can’t take anybody too seriously who tries to argue otherwise.

Third we don’t throw out old theories, at least well-established ones.  You’re confusing theory with hypothesis here.  There never was a real theory of “N-rays” for example, it was an experimental error, initially hypothesized to be associated with a new phenomenon (as yet with no theory) which was later confirmed to be an error because the results couldn’t be reproduced.

Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, which states that the force between two point objects is proportional to the product over their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distances between them, has been supplanted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.  But guess what? For most planetary motion problems, we still use Newton’s Theory.  And the General Relativity version of Newton’s Law of Gravitation for two point masses?  You can object it iteratively from Newton’s Law by first calculation the Newtonian force, correcting it for the additional mass associated with the gravitational energy via E=mc^2, then repeat. 

This was first demonstrated by Stephen Weinberg in the 1960s. That by the way is an interesting aspect of theories:  Just because Einstein wrote down the original equations doesn’t mean he understood the theory entirely!  In fact there are still unsolved problems in GR that may not be solved in our lifetimes.  And this is another form of an absolute truth:  Anybody once given the result and gifted in math can rederive any of these equations or results for themselves.  Indeed as a graduate student, I had a course in electricity and magnetism where many of the problems started out as major research papers.

This is by the way how science really works.  We scientists are gratified by the interest given to us by philosophers like Thomas Kuhn.  We just wish the guy wouldn’t write so much about shit that he only half understands.  Really, it’s quite embarrassing to read and hard to work past his physics gaffes.  But I suppose that’s just me.  Anyway, it’s an entirely silly argument.  Just open your eyes, and the truth will stream in.

We don’t just “wish” better cars on the market.  It comes with very hard work, and there are physics limitations on how efficient you can make an engine.  You can’t use more energy than is present in the chemical bonds of the gasoline you are burning for example, so we will never see 500 mpg gas.  Period.

Here’s a short argument for a similar objective morality.  Suppose we develop a metric to measure the “goodness/wellness” of the current state of an individual, group, society, nation, planet. One such measure might test how much right we are given to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for example.  Economists have more involved metrics…

But nonetheless,we can develop a metric for measuring goodness (just established that), and over time, via experimentation.  Engineers call functions that take the various parameters and assign a value to it (the metric) the “objective function”.

Secondly, over time we develop models of social dynamics that are good enough to predict the consequences of a particular action, and in fact allow us to test the consequences of different actions.  OK, we already have that to a limited degree, it’s macroeconomic theory and it gets employed by our federal reserve to help manage money.  Over time, it gets tweaked, and our money management skills get better.

Anyway, hopefully you can see where I am going with this.  Macroeconomic theory already is a restricted version of an analytic theory of morality, just a fairly limited one.  It is based on laws governing how humans behave as individuals and in crowds (game theory), and over time it gets progressively better at making predictions.

I distinguish morality from ethics.  I see ethics to be a series of generalizations from moral experience (or in some cases, innate to our being, yes that does happen, we have innate behaviors that are adaptive and therefore moral).  That is, somebody tries something that seems like the “right thing"/"wrong thing” to do, the consequences are duly noted, and over time the rules governing behavior do a better job of predict the moral outcome of an action.

You notice that this is an empirical process, right?  Again, in the sense I use objective (journalists use another that is based on fantasy notions of human nature, but never mind, separate topic), ethics is an empirically constructed set of rules that are based on underlying, but still hidden (we don’t have the Eye of Odin for example), moral principles.  Experimentation or rather experience allows us to hypothesis and refine our theories of ethics over time.

Next a few definitions since you got hung up on these.  Remembering our objective function, an act is moral (good) if it does more good than harm (net positive metric value) and immoral (bad/evil) if it does more harm than good.  In the sense that I use these words, they relate to empirical, reproducible quantities and are by definition objective.

I simply argue here that science informs us that an objective basis for morality does exist, that our theories about this objective morality will get refined over time, meaning that societies will tend to act more morally with time.  Right now we are in the “cut and try carpentry” stage with most of our law.  We get a new problem like modern drugs, we try one solution (it obviously didn’t work) and hopefully one day, we’ll try another better one.

Finally, simply because I don’t spell out what that objective morality doesn’t make me a moral relativist.  That seems more like a philosophical position than anything else.  I don’t have to be a guru of what a truth is to be able to point out that this truth exists.  I am arguing simply about existence of the thing here, not its content.

But clearly, for our society, our rules of ethic work pretty well.  Societies which lack cohesivity and for whom life continues to be a struggle, sounds like they need to adjust their ethics a bit.  (Start by stringing up the warlords in some cases.)

As to the universality of ethic codes or its lack… probably about 90% of the laws in the US probably have a corresponding law in almost any other non-totalitarian government around the world.  And yes, civil and criminal laws are an aspect of the encoding of a system of ethics for a society.

As to why it exists?  That deals with ontology.  That is outside of the realm of the empirical sciences, including the objective theory of ethics, once Hari Sheldon discovers it, that is.  That’s where science starts and religious beliefs, including your atheistic ones, begin. 

Don’t tell me that an objective reality conflicts with your religious dogma.  That’d be too funny!

spark, all this blahblah and you have not proven that objective reality does not exist. You have, on that other hand, proven you can go blahblahblahblah. And that is all.

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I’m pretty sure objective reality does exist and sparkles has proven it: If reality were subjective, in mine, sparkie would be terse and make his point in twenty five words or less.

For any voter trying to choose between the two candidates for commander in chief, there is no better test than this: When American strategy in a critical theater was up for grabs, John McCain proposed a highly unpopular and risky path, which he accurately predicted could lead to success. Barack Obama proposed a popular and politically safe route that would have led to an unnecessary and debilitating American defeat at the hands of al Qaeda.

Frederick W. Kagan

Holy shit. That’s a comment.

Sparkie, to start with I’ve read Thomas Kuhn.  In fact I have his book on the philosophy of science (read it as part of my undergraduate curriculum).  It’s rather an embarrasing work to be frank, completely full of scientific misunderstandings as well as showing an ignorance to how science itself works…

In 1962, there was nothing else like it around. Sure, it was overboard and he hedged a lot on it by the late sixties and into the seventies… but I believe he studied under Quine (post-grad I believe - they were both at Harvard), who was effing brilliant (and also wrong about many things). I am fond of Quine’s adaption of Duhem. Also, one must keep in mind who Kuhn was arguing against in the sixties. Don’t forget how bogus foundationalism is. In my mind, Kuhn used untenable concepts of justification, holism, and paradigms in order to illicit a reaction. And he did. He also collapsed gradual changes to make them appear more abrupt. Still, Paul Feyerabend (physicist turned anarchist) started writing earlier than Kuhn and if you read some of his work, you’ll see that Kuhn was conservative in comparison. Clearly we have all moved past that. My goal was just to point out that your concept of objectivity is not widely accepted among non-laymen. Again, I would stress that there isn’t such a thing as metaphysical or ontological objectivity. Sure, there is intersubjective agreement… but that’s not the same. Steve Shapin credits Boyle with the construction of ‘objectivity’ in an effort to combat the alchemists who worked alone and could never reproduce their results. It began by multiplying observers and a universal method of description and experiment reporting. Linguistic technology. If you read this article, you’ll find the beginnings of ‘objectivity’ as we know it.

Nevertheless:
When we use objective in the scientific sense pertains to observable phenomena. That has nothing to do with whether scientists as individuals manage to remain objective in their endeavors.  An objective truth is not one that people can embrace without their personal predilections getting in the way, then, it is one that can be rediscovered by other people via some measurement process.

What about unobservable phenomena that we appear to have objective knowledge of? Electrons? Quarks? Also, why do you show such a bias for the human eye? Why do you think it ‘cuts reality at the joints’? Aren’t many of our scientific discoveries counter to what our eyes tell us? Take color for example. If I say, “this ball is red.” Then I really mean that this ball is every color but red, whose wavelength the ball reflects, causing me to think that the ball is red. Moreover, I know that red is not ‘in the world’ but rather a means by which my mind interprets certain wavelengths. The red is a modification of my senses and not a property of the ball, correct? Why are we merely receptive of a portion of the energy spectrum? What if we were sensitive to radio and x-rays? The world would look different. We would probably think that the way it looks is the way it is, would we not? So how do we iron out all the biases like this? Where do we draw the line between observable reality and merely observable appearance? I don’t think that’s clear, or even close to being clear.

Secondly all you have to do is open your eyes to see that over time, we discover more truth than we knew before.  We don’t still live in caves with fire, or have horses draw our carriages, etc.  The advancement of technology is a very quantitative metric of the fact that the scientific process advances our understanding of a very real and absolute universe.  Really this is such an obvious point (you don’t still wear caveman cloths do you?) that I can’t take anybody too seriously who tries to argue otherwise.

Carrick. I can’t take anyone seriously who actually holds that humans are separate enough from nature or reality to have this sort of perspective. Many other animals change over time. Some ants, for example, practice agriculture. They harvest leaves, bring them to their underground home, and pile them where they rot and grow a fungus the ants eat. Does this mean that the ants figured it out or that they know what they are doing? You seem to think that humans are different in a manner that allows us to be separate from nature and have power over it? How are we separate? Why shouldn’t the practice and activity of science be subjected to biological, anthropological, and evolutionary study? I don’t think it should be. Clearly its an evolutionarily emergent phenomenon. Its our means of building fancier nests than the birds, surviving efficiently, and so forth. I don’t look at skyscrapers or things like that as being separate from nature… simply because they are not and I have never met with a non-question begging answer that satiates me. In my mind, most epistemologists and philosophers of science have been begging the question against Hume since the mid 1700s. Also, of late, naturalized epistemology has been catching on… the formal programs of yesteryear, whose concepts you need for your real real, are on their last leg. Sure science is bringing us past them, but only in a very self-conscious and avant garde manner, sans foundationalist justification and all the assurances about objective reality we thought we could get.

Third we don’t throw out old theories, at least well-established ones.  You’re confusing theory with hypothesis here.  There never was a real theory of “N-rays” for example, it was an experimental error, initially hypothesized to be associated with a new phenomenon (as yet with no theory) which was later confirmed to be an error because the results couldn’t be reproduced.

Sure, you can direct that against N-rays and magnetic rays, apparently group psychological phenomenons, farces… in France and Italy respectively, but you cannot make the same arguments about ether and phlogiston. Priestly, who discovered oxygen (and corresponded with T.Jefferson), did so as ‘de-phlogistonated air’. Moreover, how about the mechanical Newtonian worldview. That was beyond hypothesis stage and was found to be false. Sure, Maxwell made incredible discoveries and incorporated statistics and probability into physics (with ‘fields’ and ‘forces’ but how can we differentiate which discoveries we are now making are similar to phlogiston and which ones aren’t. It strikes me that the human sciences, such as physiognomy and cognitive neuroscience, will inform our concept of objectivity significantly in the next few years. As of yet, we cannot place the observer into the equation in a non question begging manner, especially when it comes to physics. Should we prefer Bohm’s, Copenhagen, or maybe Everett’s relative state theory of quantum physics? Its not clear which. Without that resolution… the nature of objectivity seems to me to remain fairly elusive, especially when it comes to identifying ontological reality.

Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, which states that the force between two point objects is proportional to the product over their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distances between them, has been supplanted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.  But guess what? For most planetary motion problems, we still use Newton’s Theory.

That point would seem to support my side, would it not?

And the General Relativity version of Newton’s Law of Gravitation for two point masses?  You can object it iteratively from Newton’s Law by first calculation the Newtonian force, correcting it for the additional mass associated with the gravitational energy via E=mc^2, then repeat.

Carrick, you seem to also agree that God doesn’t play dice. He might, so to speak. Also, its important to differentiate between ontology and science. Newton made his discoveries exactly because he left the debates about whether the micro-constituents of reality were forces or impenetrable points behind and just started doing math. He got results, but there relation to ontological reality is not clear.

This was first demonstrated by Stephen Weinberg in the 1960s. That by the way is an interesting aspect of theories:  Just because Einstein wrote down the original equations doesn’t mean he understood the theory entirely!  In fact there are still unsolved problems in GR that may not be solved in our lifetimes.  And this is another form of an absolute truth:  Anybody once given the result and gifted in math can rederive any of these equations or results for themselves.  Indeed as a graduate student, I had a course in electricity and magnetism where many of the problems started out as major research papers.

Weinberg-Salam ideas were not even cited until ‘71 and then only once. It took from ‘67 to ‘74 for them to actually be confirmed. It wasn’t until ‘Gargamelle’ that this work was confirmed. The mathematical ‘particle noise filters’ used at CERN, however, are about as far from observable phenomenon as one can get. Didn’t you begin by talking about observable phenomenon? Perhaps you are oversimplifying?

This is by the way how science really works.  We scientists are gratified by the interest given to us by philosophers like Thomas Kuhn.  We just wish the guy wouldn’t write so much about shit that he only half understands.  Really, it’s quite embarrassing to read and hard to work past his physics gaffes.  But I suppose that’s just me.  Anyway, it’s an entirely silly argument.  Just open your eyes, and the truth will stream in.

Honestly, I am a hedging scientific realist. That said, I do not conceive of science as being separate from nature. In my mind, it needs to be crash landed into the jungle, so to speak, and examined as an evolutionary, organic phenomenon. I advocate metascience. Also, I am a neo-Quinian. I am a ‘naturalist’ to the point were I am suspect of normativity in general. I am not convinced that normativity is a constituent of reality, whatsoever.

We don’t just “wish” better cars on the market.  It comes with very hard work, and there are physics limitations on how efficient you can make an engine.  You can’t use more energy than is present in the chemical bonds of the gasoline you are burning for example, so we will never see 500 mpg gas.  Period.

As a scientist, I’d hope for more than that from you. If we combine gas with other technologies, sure we’ll see it. And bet your ass it’ll be ‘gas efficient’. But you dodge the point of my paragraph. The point is that we don’t need normative ideals to be PART OF REALITY in order to proceed. Whether or not the figures I came up with are viable is wholly beside the point. You know that. You’re just playing like I do. I hope you can respond to the real content of that paragraph.

Here’s a short argument for a similar objective morality.  Suppose we develop a metric to measure the “goodness/wellness” of the current state of an individual, group, society, nation, planet. One such measure might test how much right we are given to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for example.  Economists have more involved metrics…

That doesn’t make any of these arbitrarily designed metrics ‘objective’. You know that.

But nonetheless,we can develop a metric for measuring goodness (just established that), and over time, via experimentation.  Engineers call functions that take the various parameters and assign a value to it (the metric) the “objective function”.

We could dream up a few objective functions, all of which are different, and all of which can be made to conform to the data, to ‘save the phenomena’ (observable that is) so-to-speak.

Secondly, over time we develop models of social dynamics that are good enough to predict the consequences of a particular action, and in fact allow us to test the consequences of different actions.  OK, we already have that to a limited degree, it’s macroeconomic theory and it gets employed by our federal reserve to help manage money.  Over time, it gets tweaked, and our money management skills get better.

Perhaps but you are ignoring the disconnect between physics and morality. As you pointed out, we can just make up a metric. We can’t just do that in physics.

Anyway, hopefully you can see where I am going with this.  Macroeconomic theory already is a restricted version of an analytic theory of morality, just a fairly limited one.  It is based on laws governing how humans behave as individuals and in crowds (game theory), and over time it gets progressively better at making predictions.

Oh, what are the objective units of pleasure or contentedness? There are none. And to establish anything like this we must appeal to subjective reports. “Are you pleased?” “Does that feel nice?” “Are you happy now?” Won’t this vary widely per individual so that whatever objective units we devise will not apply in a 1:1 manner to each and every person?

I distinguish morality from ethics.  I see ethics to be a series of generalizations from moral experience (or in some cases, innate to our being, yes that does happen, we have innate behaviors that are adaptive and therefore moral).  That is, somebody tries something that seems like the “right thing"/"wrong thing” to do, the consequences are duly noted, and over time the rules governing behavior do a better job of predict the moral outcome of an action.

When you say moral outcome you refer to the amount of pleasure or pain that results? What about masochists? Do they turn this on its head? How should we treat them? Will our objective detection methods be able to differentiate masochists, eventually? And so on?

You notice that this is an empirical process, right?

In a loose manner, certainly not on an analogue with physics.

Again, in the sense I use objective (journalists use another that is based on fantasy notions of human nature, but never mind, separate topic), ethics is an empirically constructed set of rules that are based on underlying, but still hidden (we don’t have the Eye of Odin for example), moral principles.

We still face the problem of which rules actually refer and which are merely nominal.

Experimentation or rather experience allows us to hypothesis and refine our theories of ethics over time.

Sure, they gradually fit ‘sensation’ or ‘perception’, but why are we to take them as constituents of reality? What even is reality besides yet another normative ideal, like the ‘gas efficient car’?

Next a few definitions since you got hung up on these.  Remembering our objective function, an act is moral (good) if it does more good than harm (net positive metric value) and immoral (bad/evil) if it does more harm than good.  In the sense that I use these words, they relate to empirical, reproducible quantities and are by definition objective.

Naw, that’s totally circular and you know it. You cannot define good and being ‘good-making’… or as giving rise to ‘good feelings’. That is not to provide a definition. As a scientist, I hope you can appreciate that.

I simply argue here that science informs us that an objective basis for morality does exist, that our theories about this objective morality will get refined over time, meaning that societies will tend to act more morally with time.

I disagree.

Right now we are in the “cut and try carpentry” stage with most of our law.  We get a new problem like modern drugs, we try one solution (it obviously didn’t work) and hopefully one day, we’ll try another better one.

The idea that objectively correct actions are out there, to be found, that correspond to emerging technology… strikes me as rubbish. You need to characterize ‘reality’ and also to provide a non-circular definition. Sure, perhaps you have a bootstrapping argument that can avoid this, but its bootstrapping and doesn’t get us any connections to ‘reality’, but merely internal consistency with our initial assumptions.

Finally, simply because I don’t spell out what that objective morality doesn’t make me a moral relativist.  That seems more like a philosophical position than anything else.  I don’t have to be a guru of what a truth is to be able to point out that this truth exists.  I am arguing simply about existence of the thing here, not its content.

But you refuse to characterize this thing. Why should we suppose it exists. After all that effort, you appear to be collapsing into a ‘faith’ argument.

But clearly, for our society, our rules of ethic work pretty well.  Societies which lack cohesivity and for whom life continues to be a struggle, sounds like they need to adjust their ethics a bit.  (Start by stringing up the warlords in some cases.)

I agree. However, that doesn’t commit me to ontological arguments for objective morality. I hope you can appreciate that.

As to the universality of ethic codes or its lack… probably about 90% of the laws in the US probably have a corresponding law in almost any other non-totalitarian government around the world.  And yes, civil and criminal laws are an aspect of the encoding of a system of ethics for a society.

Argument ad populum. Most people believe in God too. BFD.

As to why it exists?  That deals with ontology.  That is outside of the realm of the empirical sciences, including the objective theory of ethics, once Hari Sheldon discovers it, that is.  That’s where science ENDS and religious beliefs, including your atheistic ones, begin.

So why are you providing a scientific-style argument for objective morality? Don’t you think when you say real real you go beyond science? Isn’t ‘objectivity’ as you characterize it beyond science? Won’t most scientists be happy with ‘intersubjective agreement’?

Don’t tell me that an objective reality conflicts with your religious dogma.  That’d be too funny!

Don’t tell me you are honed into the one, true objective reality! That’d be too dogmatic!

Perhaps you are onto something. Or perhaps you are jumping the gun. I don’t feel that any of this is ‘decisive’. Also, I think HG might be using a dif. concept of objective morality. Maybe we can get him to jump in!

Touche Carrick! I’m having fun.

Sorry. Here’s the Shapin article. Forgot the link.

Carrick
I have been picking my way through this as part of my summer reading and… I’m coming to realize you’d love it. Its fairly concise, but for what it is… there is a lot in there. And he agrees with you, not me. No worries, its not bit of SSK relativist drivel.
Also, keep in mind that it behooves me, at this age, to remain significantly agnostic about most things. Once I have read another 1500 books, perhaps I will come down with more force on things. Right now, however, I am interested in the pros and cons.
I find your comment about my intellectual dishonesty to be reactionary and silly. If I had strong opinions about the world… that would be intellectually dishonest. I know the amount of info out there for me to consume and I am holding my bets for now. I mean no dishonesty. It is through the process of reading, discussing, and debating things that I come to know what I don’t believe. Making a positive case is not quite as easy.
I am interested in how all these world views hold up. Not many I have met actually do hold up. When it comes to ontology and science, however, I am fairly fond on what Arthur Fine has to say. He has an article on NOA, the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude’. Here’s a subsequent article, I can’t find the one where he introduced NOA in my pdf library right now (I need to organize and get rid of some cobwebs in there). But the linked article is a good response of his to the anti-realists. It kinda splits the difference between you and I, science wise (he doesn’t address morality).

carrick
here’s a Laudan article against your view. its fatal, IMO, barring some serious work on behalf of the ‘convergent realists’ (your camp). here’s a short list he provides of accepted (at one time), yet nonreferring scientific terms.

Sparkie, I’m running a bit behind here at work, so I won’t have a chance to respond to your comments until later this evening… However:

Laudan basically agrees with me on the main (see page 219, the discussion of what he calls “semantic” realism).

As I see it from a cursory reading, the questions he is addressing is knowability and whether empiricism is a track to knowability.

I will have to look at his examples in science, but I will warn you that it is my experience that most of the confusion is in the authors on these, that they really don’t understand or make erroneous claims about how science works.

Your confusion over what “objective” means when applied to science is a classic example of that, and demonstrates the weakness of philosophy, mainly that it uses works that allow ambiguity in their meaning.  The building blocks of science (the equations, physical constants, figures), are objective, however the English words are ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Then what happens is we get philosophers waltzing in with a remedial understanding of the underlying physics, then trying to explain to us why what we do works, or what we are really doing.  I’m OK with that, because it does lead to a lot of seemingly pointless arguments, tenure and long-term job security for philosophers.

Carrick
You didn’t answer me about ‘saving the phenomenon’, how far from ‘empirical’ particle noise filtering becomes, what the difference (that makes one real real) between intersubjective agreement and ‘objective’ is, and on and on. You shouldn’t invoke the phrase ‘real real’ if you don’t want to back it up.

YOU DIDN’T EVEN PROVIDE EXAMPLES OF OBJECTIVE SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS.

And no, Laudan doesn’t agree with you, or at least what you’ve been trying to say here.

What do you do (explain yourself) to speak with such an air of condescension? Why do you think you can float an argument with merely talking down to me?

Bullshit. Its fucking bullshit is what it is. You just cop out. Its like arguing with a Christian.

I put in effort and you offer slander.

Maybe when you aren’t at work you can respond to my main point which you ignore like the plague.

Point is, there is absolutely no appreciable difference between objective morality and non-objective morality outlined as an analogue of my ‘gas efficient car’. There is nothing you can say to add to the reality of it. You know it too.

Pssssh.

Also Kitty and Proof:
Fuck you guys. Jumped in a little soon with the negative cheer leading. Nice pom-poms, but your team has just called ‘uncle’.

You have yet to prove that reality does not exist. Till then, fuck you.

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Sparkie, I apologize for not having more time to respond, but actually what I was really saying is 1) that an absolute reality exists (Lauden agrees with this) and 2) that empirical science is a mean to discover aspects of that absolute reality.

Secondly, I am not speaking in an air of condescension.  What I am telling you is fact:  Words and their meanings are mutable, what a phrase means may change over time even to its original author.  Secondly many or more philosophers who have attempted to describe science have done so with a poor understanding of the mathematical basis for the science, and they have substituted words for the semantic meaning of the equations, physical constants, data and so forth. 

And when they do that, they are no longer are describing science.  Because science is in the equations, not in the descriptive language intended to make it easier for lay people to grasp what is being done.  However, it is a mistake to conflate those descriptions of the science with the science itself.

Third, most philosophers, and I’d bet Lauden himself is among them, has never developed a hypothesis, collected data to test it, or constructed a theoretical framework from those data once the hypothesis was confirmed.  This is critical “hands on” knowledge about how science in the main functions, and words don’t do a precise job of relating that.

This is why when we teach physics, we require so many laboratory courses, if the person is going into experimental science.  We have them replicate the process, and replicate it until their understanding is adequate enough that they can refine the process on its own. But consider this, I am a better experimentalist now than I was 10 years ago, let alone after four years of undergraduate studies.  This is true for all of us.  The empirical process itself is self correcting, and in the interplay between our efforts to understand reality and the reality itself, we as individuals learn more about the process than any simplistic explanation of the process written for lay persons could ever do. 

Eventually you mistake condescension for condemnation.  The latter is where my target was aimed in my comments above.  You philosopher types make egregious errors describing the science, you fail to appreciate at any meaningful level (even after your gaffes repeatedly get corrected), then you try to make arguments based on that flawed framework… and I’m supposed to close my eyes to what you’re doing???

If you want to speak of condescension, I would say it mostly goes the other way:  You philosophy types are like non-musicians criticizing and describing how musicians learn to play and improve their skill and are basically saying the equivalent to they really aren’t ever improving their skill or becoming better musicians over time…

Like I said above learn to open your eyes.  We don’t live in caves anymore and there is a reason for that.  Something more is known of that underlying objective reality.

You still refuse to respond to the car analogy.

We should take that as fatal for your moral argument, unless you want to speak on it.

I didn’t respond to the car analogy because you didn’t explain what you meant in an unambiguous fashion.

You on the other hand have yet to explain why, if we aren’t learning more about objective reality via experimentation, why our technologies continue to improve.

Is that just our imagination?

Yet again, you have failed to prove that reality does not exist.

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Another 12 hours of subjective reality flows by and you still have not proven it does not exist. What is the hold up?

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