Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 05/13/2008 10:56:36 AM PDT by Mongeaux
The political and social left’s ongoing romance with moral relativism is drearily familiar to us all. How many times have we been told there is no ultimate right or wrong, just shades of perspective? What’s anathema to one person may be the daily pit-stop to another. Of course, this is only true up to a point. The left is just as capable (if not moreso) of creating their own moral absolutes as their foes on the right. “Choice’ becomes an ultimate imperative over “Life”, for example.
Remember when Al Gore’s redefined the so-called “Climate Change” crisis as a “moral issue”? Considering that the science is tanking rapidly as the planet appears to be cooling instead of warming, this might have been the most expedient move for him, because it shifts the spotlight. The advantage of moral absolutes are - not only are they immune to mundane facts, but those who disagree with them can be tarred (not as dissenters) but as literally bad people. And, while it’s hard to get any traction in a free society for the idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to disagree with an Idea, it’s easy enough to argue that people shouldn’t be allowed to be immoral. The debate changes from “How can the planet be warming when temperatures haven’t budged in a decade and the oceans have actually cooled?” to “No, I am not morally equivalent to those villagers who lived outside Auschwitz because I don’t buy the Climate Change narrative.”
The Left has had a thorny relationship with science for a while now. The Beast alluded to it in an earlier post in which he pointed out that researchers have come up with findings inimical to many cherished Feminist beliefs.
So how do we reconcile these problems? Enter “Science Studies”.
(Excerpt) Read more at constitutionclub.wordpress.com ...
Superb example!
Superb example!
Note to self. Stay off Mongeaux's threads.
It's not about facts or reason. It's about feeeelings.If you don't have empathy for the feelings of others, then you are immoral.
For instance, the oft-cited “scientific consensus” sounds a lot less convincing to anyone who realizes that every time there's been a new scientific discovery the previous “scientific consensus” was thereby proven wrong.
Before Galileo's famous experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pizza; the scientific consensus was that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones.
Before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the scientific consensus was that the world was flat. (O.K. — that consensus had started to fall apart sooner, but there were still holdouts).
Reporters might also learn that scientific theories have to be falsifiable. The value of a theory is found in it's ability to generate testable hypothesis. A theory is never proved — it can be disproved. When the globe starts to get colder, instead of warmer — that indicates something is wrong with the “theory” of global warming, as embodied in the climate models. Instead — we're told to have faith that the cooling period is just temporary. If a theory cannot be falsified; it's not a scientific theory — it's a faith-based belief system. That doesn't prove that the beliefs are “wrong” — but, they cannot be said to be based on science.
It's also about not being smart enough to be a scientist. So they invent this crap instead.
The great tragedy of Atheism is not that when you deny people faith they will come to believe in nothing - it’s that they will believe anything!
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Only in the FR cartoon version of atheism.
Like Science Studies
The concept of falsifiability is greatly misunderstood, and was even by the originator of the idea, a philosopher (Karl Popper), not a scientist. To say something is falsifiable does not mean it can be proved false, it means, it can be proved false if it is false. It has to do with hypotheses, not theories. Theories, in science, are hypotheses that have been proved.
The reason falsifiability is so important is because it keeps science from being filled with wild speculations put forth as hypotheses, accepted as plausible on the mere fact there is no way to disprove them. Popper's great insight was that any hypothesis for which no test is possible which must prove it false if it is, cannot be a valid hypothesis.
Now the interesting thing is, that so many people misunderstand this, it has helped to promote the postmodernist idea that nothing is truly certain in science. In fact it means the exact opposite.
Since, for a valid hypothesis some test must be possible that will prove it false if it is; if such a test is made, and the test fails to prove the hypothesis false, it proves it correct. Of course the test would have to repeatable and observable by others, but that is what a valid scientific test is. Ironically, falsifiability actually means hypotheses are provable.
Hank
Perhaps you are thinking of radical skepticism which doubts everything.
Hank
IMHO, you are also wrong about the difference between a theory and an hypothesis. Theories can be built from observations — using inductive logic (there's where Popper was wrong, and the logical positivists correct — IMHO). A good theory also generates “testable hypothesis” (using deductive logic) — i.e. it states how it can be disproved. A theory is “not yet disproved” (Popper again) so long as the hypotheses it generates are not disproved. Even Popper didn't reject a theory on the basis of one failed hypotheses — so long as it fared better than any competing theories that had not yet been ruled out.
You're quite correct that being “falsifiable” shouldn't be confused with being “false” — it just means that it isn't “scientific”. (I thought that I'd made that clear before.) Even Popper recognized that improvements in our ability to observe can change the “unfalsifiable” into the “falsifiable”. Ancient Greek theories about atoms were unfalsifiable (and therefore “unscientific” using Popper's criteria) until it became possible to observe them. Similarly, being "unscientific" does not mean the same as being "false". A faith-based belief may, or may not be true -- it's simply not possible to verify or disprove "scientifically".
Accepting the provisional nature of scientific knowledge is not the same as postmodern notions that reject any objective reality. All that said, IMHO, the "theory" of man-made global warming is bunkum.
read later
(How awkward!—but appreciated.)
Let me start here:
“A theory is “not yet disproved” (Popper again) so long as the hypotheses it generates are not disproved”
I know you don't agree with me about the meaning of theory and hypothesis, but they are not mine, they are what science always meant by those terms up to about 25 years ago, when the latest batch of postmodernist and positivist influenced professors started changing everything. Whatever you want to call it, just not disproving something means nothing in itself (you cannot disprove there are fairies at the bottom of the garden), and that is what, in my opinion, is wrong with “inductive” logic. The whole field of taxonomy was (and is still to a great degree) mostly inductive—the observation of similarities and differences between organisms by which they are classified. Very useful, but it was not until genetics came along that taxonomy became truly “scientific.”
Like your illustration of religion, I happen to think it is true of everything that is “known” only by observation, but cannot be truly called theory until a hypothesis (my language) has been formed that if true explains why something seems to be true from observation alone, and then the hypothesis is proved by some repeatable test. As you say, that does not mean something is not true if it cannot be established that way, but it cannot be said to be established scientifically, in my opinion, until it has.
In any case, I completely agree with you about climate change of any kind being caused by human activity. The hubris of the idiots that believe man is able to affect the weather at all would be very entertaining if this foolishness were not being used by politicians for more power grabs and oppression of individual liberty.
Nice chatting with you.
Hank
No.
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