Thank you for your replies,
George (and thank you too,
Len). When/if you have the time, I am genuinely interested in what Galileo had to say, if anything, about subjects and objects (I'll see if I can find anything, too).
Reading your latest posts, I felt I should clarify one thing to you and
Ken: I am not attempting to argue that science is subjective. The kind of consensus I talked about previously (and which I don't think Ken has managed to understand yet) is not something I would describe as subjective. What I've been trying to argue, not very successfully, is for a different understanding of what objectivity is.
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Originally Posted by George
I think we may have stumbled onto common ground.  |
Maybe we have. For instance, what Ken says in
this post of his is quite close to my ideas.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by George
I simply see a fact to be something that should be taken as irrufuteable evidence, whether it is an element of a theory, or a stand-alone statement. Evidence for natural selection, branching, transmutation, may be a facts, but not evolution, nor any theory itself. How could a non-provable concept (ie theory) be a fact?
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Just a small comment; I agree with the rest of your post. Irrefutable evidence is often what we think that a fact means in the colloquial use of the term, but I would say that there is nothing totally irrefutable under the Sun. And in another thread I gave an example of a "fact" that, when carefully analysed, is really a "theory" we don't question anymore: the proposition that human beings do not live to be much more than a decade over 100.