Reason
#3,429 I'm not popular at parties: I have issues with things like this. Science isn't "real" (The Might Be Giants kinda lost me with that song a decade or two ago). Science is an explanatory framework or a particular kind of investigation process, not the results of those. More importantly (to me), science doesn't actually deal in "reality." It can never establish what's real or not. To be fair, we probably don't have any system of knowledge that can, unless you believe in religious or other mystical systems that are usually defined as being unverifiable by the methods science uses (e.g., public replication on demand, etc.).
Science gives potential explanations for phenomena, along with (usually) methods of testing the extent to which those explanations match empirical observations. But reality never appears. Many people (including me, most of the time) believe that there is a "reality" that might potentially be described by scientific theories, hopefully with increasing accuracy, but even that is difficult or impossible to really establish--as far as I know, science can't prove that reality exists or that science is interacting with it if it does. Even empirical observations are mired in the "is there even a reality to describe" problem. The issue gets thorny and very unsatisfying, according to the philosophers I've read (the ones I can understand, but mostly other people summarizing their ideas).
#Science isn't "real." It's the explanatory system with the best track record so far of matching predictions to observations, by a long shot. This is a
#soapbox I get on from time to time.
Honestly, I think the "science is real" messaging is unhelpful. It's magical thinking packaged as rationality.
#empiricism #evidence #philosophy #popper #petpeeve #sciencecommunication
