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Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent
First question: Would you then say that psychology is not a science? After all, in phychology the subject and the object coincide.
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The subject and the object do not coincide
when psychology is being a science, i.e., when a scientist is learning about a brain, that scientist is not the brain being studied (introspection is a special component of cognitive study and is largely discounted as science, though is probably worth its own consideration). There are many forms of "soft science", some extremely soft, like the science of art appreciation. There are certainly people using science to try and study what constitutes good art, or how art affects people. My point is, we don't need a broad brush that says that is or is not a valid pursuit, we just need to be able to tell when art appreciation is being addressed scientifically, and when it is not. That has to do with objectivity and demonstrability, not consensus-- indeed, there's probably
more consensus on what is good art than would show up scientifically.
But I will grant you that we are a long way from understanding consciousness using science, if that's what you are driving at, and it is not at all obvious to me how much progress science can ever make into that issue, expressly because of the problems with objectivity.
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My question was simply: did Galileo ever say that? Did he even use the words 'subject' and 'object' with this meaning? That would surprise me greatly.
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I frankly don't know, but what difference would it make? The scientific method was not handed to us by Galileo like the Ten Commandments, it was something we created based
in part on his breakthroughs.
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For example, the insistence on the distinction between a "law" and a "theory" that physicists love so much, or the claim (with respect to evolution and other hot button pieces of science) that the public "is just ignorant about the meaning of theory"...these are things which often come off as pedantic, petty, and beside the point to me.
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No disagreement from me. I never thought the problem with evolution being "just a theory" was the understanding of the "theory" word, it was the understanding of the "just" word. All "theory" means is a unification of facts into a consistent conceptual tapestry with the intention of generating testable hypotheses. If that sounds like a small thing to those people, that is the educational problem right there.
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One example I can think of is the absolute status of time and space, which were "facts" for all those physicists from Newton until the 19th century, but became "questionable" with Einstein.
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Yes, I agree, scientific facts result from the interaction with scientific methodology and reality, but there's nothing written in stone about them.
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In case I'm being too obscure, to me "fact" and "hypothesis/law/theory" are relative terms in science. Facts are the things we don't question at present (can I tease Ken and call them "axioms"?  ), while the rest are what is under discussion, what's "on the table", to use a term from business.
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Don't call them axioms, even in teasing-- they don't like it. Because the role of axioms is to make sense of facts, to
unify facts, not to
be facts.