What qualifies as science?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Jozen-Bo, Apr 25, 2017.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I am of the impression I typed that as a third example of the risk of enslavement to a defunct philosophy - along with gold as real money, and Social Darwinism.
     
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  3. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    My apologies if I misrepresented your post and your views

    I shall speak severely to my 3 neurone brain and send it to sleep with out supper

    Again apologies

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  5. river

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    Then the science community has not done its due diligence.
     
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  7. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    What part of "Science has investigated all sorts of bunkum Woo Woo and Cowpat" did you miss? How is that not "due diligence"?
     
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  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I'm guessing here that it is EXPECTED that within the bunkum Woo Woo and Cowpat SOMETHING exist

    But because Science has failed to find it Science has failed in its due diligence

    It would be helpful if the believers in any of the bunkum Woo Woo and Cowpat would give a helping hand (information) about EXACTLY what is being looked for

    Aliens? Look for a physical body???

    UFO? Look for what????

    Strange noises? Look for something that makes a noise???

    Ghost? Look for something which looks like a ghost???

    Oh well back to the drawing board us disbelievers

    This time we must do our due diligence and design a recording device which can pick out and determine WHAT is causing all this bunkum Woo Woo and Cowpat or we will never hear the end of it

    (Let the record show that this Scientist suspects even IF we

    debunk

    un Woo Woo and

    find the Cowpat producer is a cow

    our work will not be done and

    further diligence will be due from us)

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  9. river

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    The only way to get beyond , cowpat , is to investigate this so called nonsense with serious science investigations .

    Otherwise it will hound you deniers , always !!!!
     
  10. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    investigate this so called nonsense with serious science investigations

    Has been done

    If you think it hasn't been

    find an agreeable Scientist wanting to win

    a Nobel Prize and provide him/her with

    the observations which require conformation

    and the equipment to use

    Otherwise it will hound you deniers , always

    I have found whenever I ignore

    Cowpat or

    Woo Woo or

    bunkum it does not hound me

    It either ignores me or

    fades away

    Since I am not paying attention I am not sure which occurs the most

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  11. river

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    Serious investigation has not been done .
     
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  12. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Then find an agreeable Scientist wanting to win

    a Nobel Prize and provide him/her with

    the observations which require conformation

    and the equipment to use

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  13. river

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    Otherwise it will hound you deniers , always !!!!

    I'm not looking for an agreeable scientist , what we should all want is an objective scientist(s) to investigate the unexplained , throughly .
     
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  14. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I think most people are happy that the Scientist who have investigated BunkWooCowpatisms have been objective as everyone expects them to be

    And if your not looking for an agreeable Scientist

    Then find an objective Scientist wanting to win

    a Nobel Prize and provide him/her with

    the observations which require conformation

    and the equipment to use

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  15. river

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    Its better to find scientists that are after the truth not a noble prize .
     
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  16. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Then find an objective Scientist who are after the truth (and INSERT ANY NEW REQUIREMENT(S) YOU THINK OF) and provide him/her with

    the observations which require conformation

    and the equipment to use

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  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Michael. This. Is. River.

    You will get nowhere.

    The Ignore function is your friend.

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  18. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks

    I was on the verge

    I have certainly exceeded my 3 PINGS but my curiosity wanted to find out how high the irrational content would go

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    Thanks again

    Will stay on the roundabout horse a few more turns

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  19. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    The problem is that the reverse-deniers have already decided what "the truth" is. You won't accept any amount of investigation that doesn't turn up the answer that you want.
     
  20. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    The spiritual stuff would seem on its face to violate science's methodological naturalism. So we would need to invent a new non-natural science to addresss them, in contrast to natural science. Unlike some on this board, I don't think that's necessarily impossible.

    If we try to invent a spiritual science, what kind of phenomena would it address? What is a spiritual phenomenon? How would a spiritual phenomenon be distinguished from one that isn't spiritual? A closely related question addresses how we become aware of spiritual phenomena and what kind of information can we obtain about them? Do sources of information exist apart from and in addition to our conventional senses and their objects? How would this spiritual science establish objectivity? (Or would it even try? But if it's entirely subjective, why call it 'science'?)

    We already have one obvious example of what might be called a non-physical science: mathematics. But as different as mathematics is from physical science, mathematics has a unique methodology all its own in its very rigorous logical proofs, that produce results that mathematicians everywhere on Earth can agree on. So what kind of methodology would proponents of parapsychology and creation science propose to address their peculiar subjects? That's a task that they don't seem to have ever really addressed.

    Then the spiritual science would need some explanatory hypotheses. It isn't enough to name a hypothetical 'PSI phenomenon' (let's say), in order for parapsychology to be a productive science, it would need to take a shot at explaining what is observed. About the best that I've seen is a crude classification of 'PSI phenomena', and if things move around mysteriously, people saying 'Oh, that's telekenesis' or 'Oh, that's poltergeists', as if naming it somehow explains it.

    The spiritual sciences need to be able to generate hypotheses that are open to further investigation. In conventional science, scientists investigate this, which raises questions about that, and investigations kind of snow-ball. Investigating what's inside animals' bodies leads to anatomy and physiology, which lead to histology, biochemistry, cell and developmental biology... questions upon questions. The new spiritual sciences need to be able to generate productive research programs that enable deeper and deeper investigations into their chosen subjects. And that returns us to the subject of explanation, since as science progresses deeper and deeper into its rabbit holes, explanations proliferate as surface phenomena are reduced to whatever lies deeper. So previously inexplicable organ function in animal bodies can now be explained by the new information from biochemistry, histology and physiology.

    The new sciences need to be capable of surprising us, revealing entirely new and unsuspected kinds of phenomena.

    And they need to display what philosophers call consilience, where entirely different lines of inquiry, using different methods and presuppositions, arrive at essentially the same results. In natural science we see that when paleontologists hypothesize an evolutionary history for an organism based on fossil evidence, and when the molecular geneticists independently produce the same history based on genomic evidence.
     
    Last edited: Jun 20, 2017
  21. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I don't believe that natural science pays a whole lot of attention to what lies outside the scope of its methods and concepts. Given its methodological naturalism, I don't know how it could.

    Wouldn't that be circular reasoning? Start out with the assumption that everything that doesn't conform to a chosen worldview is bullshit, then conclude that everything that doesn't conform to that worldview is bullshit.
     
  22. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Well here's the thing

    As Charlie Sheen noted in a episode of Two and a half Men

    There's always a thing

    What I have noticed,

    not only in regards to spiritual phenomenon,

    you can take out the word spiritual and

    replace it with whatever buzz word is

    current in Cowpat Country, is that the

    phenomenon is not repeatable

    Ghostbusters are called to a haunted house

    where a apparition has been seen every night

    floating though the corridors for hundreds of years

    As soon as the Ghostbusters set up their

    equipment and armed with endless cups of

    coffee the apparition takes a holiday

    After 2 weeks Ghostbusters move on

    Mrs Floating Apparition comes back

    Good luck with designing equipment and testing protocol for such senerios

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  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    No

    The thing is (

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    look another thing) is any investigator worth his or her salt will want to discover something new and will NOT start with any preconceived notions

    If there could be said to be ANY assumption it would tend to be in favour of finding something

    Mrs Floating Apparition might exist and it was just bad luck she went on holiday when I set up my ghost detection equipment

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