[DJP]

LBird wrote:

If science does not produce 'certain' knowledge (and science already tells us that it doesn't), this lets in the social aspect.Once this is done, it's as 'scientifically valid' to start from the Koran, which will 'explain and predict' from a 'Muslim science' perspective.That's our problem, in a nutshell. We have to find a social basis for 'Communist science'.There are no bald 'scientifically arrived at ones'. That is to posit a socially-neutral method of science. You (and ALB) seem to agree that this doesn't exist, without realising its implications.

But where are you getting your certainty from?How do you know that what you are claiming above is true?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

The litmus test of this, though, is my question about the 17th century sun/earth realtionship. To argue that it was 'untrue', because we now know the 'truth', is not possible.The only answer we can give is that "it was 'true' then', but it's 'untrue' now, and in the future we recognise the possibility that it could be 'true', yet again".

OK, we might be getting somewhere now.All you are saying here is that knowledge is that knowledge is uncertain, that's fine.The problem with your answer is that there is never a certain set of knowledge that is accepted by all people at all times. In the 17th century there where people who took either side of the sun / earth orbit. So when you say "it was true that the sun went round the earth in the 17th century" all you are really saying is that "in the 17th century more people thought that the sun went round the earth than thought the opposite", you are only referring to the relative truth.[In fact a poll taken in America in 1999 revealed that 18% of those asked thought that the sun revolved around the earth (3% had no opinion)]We need to have a critior to enable us to evaluate competing claims. This criteria will never give us 100% certainty. So whilst appreciating that we can (probably) never know the absolute truth when faced with two competing claims we should choose the one that offers the most explanatory and predictive power. Through the gradual accumulation of successes and failures the social venture that is science is gradually building up a body of knowledge that does for our practical purposes lead to a very high degree of certainty.BTW Classical physics is not wrong, it has just been shown to be a partial truth (so no surprise there). It still explains the movements of the celestial bodies, it's just that further interrogation of nature suggests that there is another granular level of existence going on..So "Science doesn't produce absolute truth therefore the Koran is equally valid" can be argued against because religious arguments do not hold the same predictive and explanatory power as scientifically arrived at ones.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

You apparently 'hold' that it's 'certain' that the earth goes round the sun. So, end your curiosity, look in the mirror, switch on, start reading more widely, pay attention to what I'm writing, and don't look for 'badly written science textbooks', but search closer to home with your 'badly written posts'.Enlightenment might follow.

Oh dear. Myself and others have repeated stated we do not hold this position yet you keep claiming we do…. If there was someone who is producing books that put forward a "naive realist" viewpoint I thought it would be good to know about it, and if there was you would know…

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

I must say, I don't like the tone of your post, and if you don't desist in taking the piss, and engage in a comradely and constructive fashion, things might well change.

OK apologies. Let me rephrase. Seeing as you've said that "science is ideology" and "science does not produce truth" on what basis do you hold your acceptance off communism as a possible practicle reality? I.e on what grounds do you justify your ideology. It's an honest question I mean no harm by it.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

But its philosophical importance is that this position undermines the notion of scientific 'certainty'.

I'm curious to know who you think actually holds this position? Some badly written science textbooks perhaps?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

If we believe that humans can collective control the economy, and there will be an end to private property, we must believe that humans have the capacity to collectively control their science.

But why do YOU believe those thing are possible? On what basis? Did Allah tell you? Or you just felt it to be true?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Rovelli wrote:

But answers given by natural science are not credible because they are definitive; they are credible because they are the best we have now, at a given moment in the history of knowledge. (p. xvi)

But what is it about a theory that makes it the "best we have now"?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Rovelli wrote:

 Newtonian physics, despite its immense effectiveness, is actually wrong,

So what makes it false? The fact that people don't believe that it is true?

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

Brian, to help you understand the whole debate, have a look at this:http://voices.yahoo.com/7-steps-understanding-characteristics-postmodernism-3730670.html?cat=4

A lot of this debate is also covered in chapters 7 and 8 of Alan Sokal's "Beyond the Hoax". For what it is worth I'm all in favour of the kind of "modest realism" that is proposed here.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

The 'truth' produced by our interaction, through conceiving, building and launching probes and satellites, with a really-existing external world is a 'social construct'.

If you are talking about what is "true for" people, i.e what they believe to be true i.e the partial or relative truth then I would agree.Note the difference in meaning from "relative" to "absolute" truth. What people believe to be true is always a partial and relative truth but what really is true is determined by how well the knowledge lines up with the absolute truth or nature and the cosmos. The trouble is we can't absolutely and forever fully grasp this truth, and if we could there would be no need to do science in the first place.

LBird wrote:

You identify object and knowledge as identical entities, and so you can't separate out that 'truth' relates to 'knowledge' and is therefore a 'social construct'. This social construct is produced by asking questions of the object, which really exists.

No, you think I think that. Truth, the absolute truth, which is the kind that we are interested in here since the question I posed to you was "how do you assess the truth of competing claims?"You still have not answered the question

LBird wrote:

What do you mean by 'reality': the 'object' or 'knowledge'?

Both, and more. 'Reality' is everything, including all the contradictory conceptions of it generated in peoples minds.

LBird wrote:

If you insist that we can 'know' reality without a social process of knowledge production, the ball is in your court to show how we can have this unmediated access to your 'reality' (my 'object').

I don't insist that, you're mistaking me for comrade strawman again.

LBird wrote:

So, you accept that it is not certain that the earth goes round the sun? Or are you 100% certain? How 'certain' was the 17th century, compared with 'certain' now? We must have a historical account of 'science', rather than a 'one-off discovery' viewpoint.

We cannot be absolutely certain about anything! Radical skepticism cannot be disproved. The world as it exists now, including all memories and indications of past events, could have been created in an instant 5 minutes ago. This is impossible to disprove. But on the other hand this is no reason for believing it to be true.Or what of the problem of induction? All our knowledge of the world is built upon by inferring from past events. But for all we know the rules of the game that we have inferred from up to this point might suddenly change in the next instant. We are like the chickens that each morning on seeing the farmer come out of the coop expecting to be fed. All well and good until one morning when the farmer appears but this time he is carrying the axe and not the grain bowl.So all I mean is that absolute certainty is something that cannot be gained but given the vast amount of interlocking pieces of evidence that now support the theory that the earth goes round the sun anyone who asserts otherwise is really talking out of their hat.

[DJP]

Does the fact that we have launched space probes, satellites and landed things on other planets not mean anything to you? Do you seriously think that it is all a social construct? I don't think you do and that is why you insist on shifting the burden of proof…Even before the 17th century people had put forward a sun centred theory of the planets, and even after the 17th century the idea was not immediately accepted. So was the reality that the sun did and did not go round earth during this period?"Reality" is not a social construct (less the parts of it concerning society and humans interactions with nature) and it can neither be observed fully either. Nobody thinks that science brings the kind of 100% certain knowledge that you claim those that reject your relativism do.

Dietzgen wrote:

To understand more clearly the nature of the absolute truth it is first of all necessary to do away with the old-rooted prejudice which regards it as of a purely mental nature. No, no! Absolute truth can be seen, heard, smelt, touched and, of course, also known; but it cannot be resolved into pure knowledge, – it is not pure mind. Its nature is not either corporeal, or mental, not one or the other, but all embracing, as much corporeal as spiritual. Absolute truth has no nature of its own, but, on the contrary, it has the nature of the general. In other words, to speak without mystification, the general natural nature and general truth are identical. There are no two Natures, one corporeal and another a mental. There is only one Nature which contains all bodies and all minds.The Universe is identical with Nature, with the world and the absolute truth. Natural science divides Nature into parts, domains, branches of study, but it knows and feels that all such divisions are formal only, that Nature or Universe is in spite of all divisions undivided, – in spite of all variety and manifold natures only one indivisible, general and universal Nature, World and Truth. There is only one Existence, and all forms are modi, varieties or relative truths of one general truth which is absolute, eternal and endless at all times, in all places. Human knowledge is, like anything else, a limited portion of the unlimited, a modus, a variety of Existence or General Truth.Since the nature of truth has hitherto been regarded as purely mental, and accordingly, truth was looked upon as a thing which is only to be found in knowledge, the inquiry into human knowledge comes within the province of our subject, of our search after the absolute and relative truth and their relation.The mental world of man, that is, all we know, believe and think, forms a portion of the universal world which only in its absolute inter-relation, in its complete whole possesses an unlimited, perfect, absolute existence, a true one in the highest sense of the word. At the same time it possesses through its component parts, modi, varieties, products or phenomena an infinite number of existences of which every particular one is also true, but is as against the whole a mere relative truth.Human knowledge, itself a relative truth, is the medium between us and the other phenomena or relativities of the absolute Existence. Still the faculty of cognition, the knowing subject, must be distinguished from the object, the distinction being, however, a limited and relative one, since both the subject and the object are not only distinct, but at the same time alike in that they are parts or phenomena of the same generality called the Universe. We distinguish between Nature and parts, departments or phenomena, though these are inseparably connected with the All-Existence, emerge from it and submerge in it. There is no Nature without phenomena, her manifestations, nor phenomena without Nature, as the Absolute. It is only our knowledge which provides the separation, the mental analysis in order to form an image of the phenomena. Knowledge, conscious of its doings dealings, must know that the mentally separated, differentiated objects are indivisibly bound up with the reality of Nature.What we learn to know are truths, relative truths or natural phenomena. Nature itself, the absolute truth, cannot be known, – not directly, but only through her manifestations, the phenomena. How then do we know that there is behind the phenomenon an absolute Truth, a general Nature? Is this not a new mysticism?Well, let us see. As human knowledge is not the absolute truth, but only an artist making pictures of the truth, true, genuine, correct and exact pictures, it is self-evident that the picture does not exhaust the object and that the artist cannot reach the comprehensiveness of the model. Nothing more insipid has ever been said of truth and knowledge than what has been repeated for thousands of years by the commonly accepted logic, namely, that truth is the conformity of our knowledge with its object. How can a picture “conform” with its model? Approximately it can. What picture worth the name does not agree approximately with its object? Every portrait is more or less of a likeness. But to be altogether alike, quite the same as the original – what an abnormal idea!Thus we can only know Nature and her parts relatively, since even a part, though only a relation of Nature, possesses again the characteristics of the Absolute, the nature of the All-Existence which cannot be exhausted by knowledge.http://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1887/epistemology.htm

Emphasis mine.So all truths can only be known partially and relatively. Though where I think we differ is that I take this to mean that partial truths are relative to the absolute truth, to nature, reality whatever you want to call it. You see them as being relative to each other only…So if you think you can present a cognitivist relativist account of truth and knowledge that doesn't collapse into the contradictions I have mentioned or revert to idealism I would really be grateful to hear it. Till then, less of the melodrama 

[DJP]

Interesting stuff. Now what does this tell us about science, ideology and epistemology. 

[DJP]

I'd sooner get the epistemology sorted out. For the last coming on 2 months I have been trying to tease out of LBird what would be regarded as an adequate criteria for judging the truth of competing statements. If you think that "truth" should be redefined to mean something other than "in accord with reality" I would like you to outline how this could be done without referring back to the original meaning at some point.If you think that to understand your answer it would be necessary to understand some further claims from Schaff then fine. But outline your answer now then we can backfill in the missing pieces later.

[DJP]

Step 1. Write somethingStep 2. Send it to the Standard

[DJP]

Hi LBird,OK so let's borrow Deitzgen's terms. So the NHS is the "Absolute Truth"  and the IT system the "relative truth". Now we can never fully grasp the whole of the absolute truth, no-one has claimed that (apart from comrade strawman) but what if we are faced with competing designs of IT systems (or relative truths), how do we work out which is the more valid?Or is the truth of a theory solely contained in how well it fits the purposes of those who are using it?

[Author]

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