--- James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> wrote: >
> It's very difficult to do science if you believe
> that truth is socially
> constructed.
and also
>Scientific facts are decided by material.
>Scientific consensus merely recognises that.
both of which have to be category-mistakes, shurely. It's no more difficult to *do* science whatever your epistemological view on the results. And the statement that "scientific facts are decided by material" is far to restrictive, even if we restrict the domain to physics. Are Maxwell's equations "scientific facts"? If so, what material is it that decides them? If not, why not? And what about the numerous scientific laws which refer to objects like rigid bodies, frictionless surfaces, and perfect gases, things which do not and could not exist.
Almost all the science anyone but a particular kind of specialist ever learns is not decided by natural facts. Science refers to the natural world in the same way that economics does; by making models of it, abstracting from some details and concentrating on others. And it has exactly the same kind of truth-constructing process as economics; the formation of social consensus about which observations matter to the model and which don't. It just happens to be the case that there are fewer politically motivated wankers in (most) scientific circles. It always surprises me how much stick people like Irigaray got for pointing out that if the development of science hadn't been so utterly driven by the need to fling heavy objects in trajectories, we might have more of a theory of viscous flows.
A view of "scientific facts" which is so simon-pure as to exclude Newton's Laws of Motion surely has to have something wrong with it.
dd
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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