>--- 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.
Right. Scientific facts -- products of human beings' mental labor -- are under-determined by what scientific facts refer to. Otherwise, it is impossible to have scientific disagreements to begin with, & therefore impossible to make scientific progress, for progress comes from a dialectic of agreements & disagreements.
What scientific facts are meant to describe is real causes, i.e., mechanisms that give rise to empirically observable phenomena. A given empirically observable phenomenon is necessarily a product of multiple real causes exercising their respective powers variously, sometimes some cancelling out others. That is why we need scientific experiment, multiple regression analysis, etc., in order to isolate relative powers & virtues of various causes. A very difficult task.
In short, we need an understanding of science & reality as differentiated & stratified: 1. a realm of scientific labor; 2. a realm of empirically observable phenomena; 3. a realm of real causes with powers & virtues.
Yoshie