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Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent
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We covered this long ago on this thread. Galileo is credited as the father of the scientific method in some places, but nobody claims he gave birth to it fully formed. He was still raising science out of the darkness of natural philosophy, where if the Greeks believed it it had to be true. The process went through considerable evolution into its modern form, taking particularly important strides in Newton's time (Newton was born the year Galileo died). Hence, few would expect Galileo to have delivered science in its complete modern form, and cherry picking his remarks prove little. I note that the paradigm he was dispelling with his observations, that of Ptolemy, was supremely mathematical in nature. Is that not a well known fact?
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I also took a look at the Wikipedia article on the scientific method, which Ken dug up in his support. Nowhere is the subject-object dichotomy mentioned, or, in my opinion, even hinted at.
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More insightful readers may see quite a bit more than a "hint" of a subject/object dichotomy in the sentence in that link "Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results." If they don't see it yet, they might actually click on the hypertext "objective" in that sentence, which brings them to the very first sentence:
"Objectivity in science is the property of scientific measurement that can be tested independent from the individual scientist (the subject) who proposes them."
In other words, the core of avoiding bias is not looking for people to agree with you (never the least guarantee of avoiding bias), but instead, to seek an explicit separation of the result from the person doing it. As I've been saying.
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On the other hand, regarding the collaborative aspect of science, which is what I alluded to when I spoke of consensus, there is of course the following:...
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Useful for anyone who doubted that collaboration plays a role in the advancement of science. Of course, that group would not include those, such as myself, to whom that is already quite obvious. We can pretend that was the issue here, but it was not-- it was the role of consensus in the concept of "objectivity". Many times have I pointed out that many human pursuits, that are not science and make no effort to be objective, involve collaborative effort. If
Disinfo Agent insists on repeating earlier arguments, it falls on me to repeat the refutations.
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The experiments of some imaginary Robinson Crusoe genius, alone in his own island-universe, would hardly be reproducible by other scientists/observers.
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But they would be reprodicible by him/her, and thereby, he/she would indeed be doing science-- obviously. Indeed that is how babies learn the beginnings of scientific thought long before they are even able to communicate with any "consensus" results that is claimed here to be so essential to science. Galileo's telescopic observations did not become science when someone else confirmed them, they just became a more concrete scientific result. They became science when Galileo himself repeated them over and over and studied their repeatable elements, separately from any variables he could attribute to himself.
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And, in the Wikipedia article about the history of the scientific method, I found the following principles, from Newton...
Not only is there no reference to the subject-object dichotomy, but it's interesting how the idea that scientific hypotheses may be superseded by others (the principle of falsification) was already articulated by him (point 4).
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Again, more than a hint of a subject/object dichotomy is indeed present. Newton stresses (twice) the importance of experiment over pure thought. How anyone intends on doing such an experiment without first making a subject/object dichotomy, I suspect, would be news to Newton.
Yet another rehash from earlier in the thread. This was all covered above-- no one on this thread, least of all me, ever claimed pure mathematics was useless. I don't even think chess is useless, or any other game. If it was discovered that some of the solutions to achieving checkmate in certain positions in chess had some connection with a group of elementary particles, would I be the least bit surprised? No, not the least bit. I said as much above in the bit about Hardy. What separates pure mathematics from science is the way it is carried out-- specifically, what counts as the authority to justify a conclusion. Not the happenstance appearance of usefulness, nope, never said that, never thought it.