Talk:Paradigm shift

G.D. (talk) 08:59, 19 April 2020 (UTC)Should be moved to "Paradigm shift", right? human be in 18:56, 3 October 2007 (EDT)
 * Yeah, fine, i just love caps.--PalMD-If it looks like a donut, eat it 19:00, 3 October 2007 (EDT)
 * I deleted the capped redirects after fixin' the links (and after Shagie fixed some stuff). Paradigm still redirects here, though. human be in 19:33, 3 October 2007 (EDT)
 * Thank you for using your powerz for good and not EVIL--PalMD-If it looks like a donut, eat it 19:40, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

Oh, good lord: another deeply confused nonsense article. It would be good to have someone with minimal understanding of philosophy of science to write the philosophy of science-articles, wouldn't it? The "Newton's Dark Legacy" section is clearly written by someone unable to draw even basic distinctions (e.g. between metaphysics and epistemology), and is based on a feeble misunderstanding of a Philosophy Stack Exchange post about the distinction between fact and truth:

"The problem was (and is) is that in terms of philosophy, "fact" and "truth" are are actually totally different things.[2] "A fact is a reality that cannot be logically disputed or rejected." whereas, "Truths are those things that are not simply acknowledged, but must be discovered, or created" or to over simplify, a fact is what can be demonstrated to be true through observation and-or testing. Truth on the other hand is subjective".

No. This is not the distinction. At all. A FACT is a piece of reality - that Trump is president or that humans evolved or climate is changing or what have you. Some facts are known, others are not. A fact is a fact regardless of whether you observe it or accept it or understand it or know it. Whether something is a fact is just a matter of how the world is - it has *nothing* to do with whether it has been demonstrated or not. TRUTH, on the other hand, is a property of models or descriptions or beliefs or statements. Think of the relationship between truth and fact as the relationship between a map and the terrain: Just as the map is correct if it matches the terrain (in the proper ways), so a statement, or model, or belief, is true if the world is the way the statement or model or belief says that world is - i.e. if it matches the facts. Saying that "truth is constructed" is, in a trivial sense, correct: in the sense that WE create the sentences, models and beliefs that have this property or not. But whether those sentences, models and beliefs are, in fact, true or not, is not up to us. Truth is not fucking subjective.

The whole section here is utterly confused about these pretty basic distinctions. In particular, the author is making the typical intro student error of confusing *belief* and *fact*. For instance, the article says: "At one time stating that the Sun revolved around the Earth was the truth". This is, of course, nonsense. At one point in time, that the Sun revolved around the Earth was *believed to be* true. But the sun didn't revolve around the Earth back then either, so the belief was, of course, not true. [This, by the way, is the confusion typically made by superficial post-modernists]. A belief doesn't become true just because you have it. Similarly with the claims about religions: What the religions *claim to be true* or *believe to be true* varies. But what is, in fact, true, doesn't.

Being guilty of such feeble confusions, the author goes on to draw silly conclusions like "The problem with that view science as the seeker of truth is it created a totally inaccurate view of science." But of course science is the seeker of truth: Science seeks to give us true and accurate models and beliefs and descriptions of the world. It does that e.g. by uncovering facts. That's sort of what distinguishes science from writing fiction. (Again, I know of postmodernist literature people who do think that science is just like writing fiction, but I don't think this is the view the author of the article is going for.)

Another silly conclusion: With Einstein it was established that we "could not know everything and there were no certainties only probabilities"; accordingly "the public concept of "Science as the Seeker of Truth", born of Newton, got kicked in the head and there really wasn't anything certain and concrete to replace it with."

Sigh. Yes, in modern science we admit that we (possibly) cannot know everything and no, nothing is certain. But confusing *truth* and *certainty* is a pretty silly mistake: whether our beliefs are true is one thing; whether we can know or be certain that they are, is another. We aim to make our models and descriptions as accurate as possible - i.e. true - but we have learned that we can never be certain, and even cherished theories have to go when we get sufficient evidence that they are false. The aim of science is accordingly truth, not certainty. I mean, to get a feel for the conceptual confusion going on here: how do you understand *evidence* or *probabilities* if not in terms of truth? Evidence for a theory is evidence that the theory is true; the probability of a hypothesis is the probability that *the hypothesis is true*. If you didn't think truth was the crucial goal of science, evidence and probability wouldn't make any sense either. (No, the goal can't be *facts*: facts are just there: we don't, in a relevant sense, change the *facts* by making scientific progress - rather, we build better theories and models, theories and models that are more likely to be true; scientific models is about refining *the models* and *theories*, not the world or the facts, and truth and accuracy are the standards.)

Look, this section is confused about elementary philosophical distinctions. I suggest just deleting the whole thing. It's an embarrassment to RationalWiki. G.D. (talk) 08:59, 19 April 2020 (UTC)