“Some truths are outside of science’s purview” (as exemplified by e.g. Hollywood shows where a scientist is faced with very compelling evidence of supernatural, but claims it would be “unscientific” to take that evidence seriously).
My favorite way to illustrate this would be that approximately around the end of 19th century/beginning of 20th century [time period is from memory, might be a bit off] belief in ghosts was commonplace with a lot of interest in doing spiritual seanses, etc, while rare stories of hot rocks falling from the sky were mostly dismissed as tall tales. Then scientists followed the evidence, and now most everybody knows that meteorites are real and “scientific”, while ghosts are not, and are “unscientific”.
I tend to agree but only to an extent. To our best understanding, cognition is a process of predictive modelling. Prediction is an intrinsic property of the brain that never stops. A misprediction (usually) causes you to attend to the error and update your model.
Suppose we define science as any process that achieves better map-territory convergence (i.e. minimise predictive error). In that case, it is uncontroversial to say that we are all, necessarily, engaged in the scientific process at all times, whether we like it or not. Defining science this way, it is reasonable to say that no claim about reality is, in principle, outside the purview of science.
Moral Uncertainty claims that even with perfect epistemic and ontological certainty, we still have to deal with uncertainty about what to do. However, I’ve always struggled to see how the above claim about map-territory convergence applies to goal selection and morality. I am not claiming that goal selection and morality are necessarily outside the purview of science. I am just puzzled by this.
How can we make scientific claims about selecting goals? Can we derive an ought from an is? Is it nonsensical to try and apply science to goal selection and morality? I subscribe to physicalism, and I thus believe that goals, decisions and purposes are absurd notions when we boil them down to physics. My puzzlement could be pure illusory but, still, I am puzzled.
Right, something like “Some objective truths are outside of science’s purview” might have been a slightly better phrasing, but as the goal is to stay at the commonsense level, trying to parse this more precisely is probably out of scope anyway, so can as well stay concise...
But some stuff is explicitly outside of science’s purview, though not in the way you’re talking about here. That is, some stuff is explicitly about, for example, personal experience, which science has limited tools for working with since it has to strip away a lot of information in order to transform it into something that works with scientific methods.
Compare how psychology sometimes can’t say much of anything about things people actually experience because it doesn’t have a way to turn experience into data.
I think this might conflate “science” with something like “statistics”. It’s possible to study things like personal experience, just harder at scale.
The Hollywood-scientist example illustrates this, I think. Dr. Physicist finds something that wildly conflicts with her current understanding of the world, and would be hard to put a number on, so she concludes that it can’t and shouldn’t be reasoned about using the scientific method.
“Some truths are outside of science’s purview” (as exemplified by e.g. Hollywood shows where a scientist is faced with very compelling evidence of supernatural, but claims it would be “unscientific” to take that evidence seriously).
My favorite way to illustrate this would be that approximately around the end of 19th century/beginning of 20th century [time period is from memory, might be a bit off] belief in ghosts was commonplace with a lot of interest in doing spiritual seanses, etc, while rare stories of hot rocks falling from the sky were mostly dismissed as tall tales. Then scientists followed the evidence, and now most everybody knows that meteorites are real and “scientific”, while ghosts are not, and are “unscientific”.
I tend to agree but only to an extent. To our best understanding, cognition is a process of predictive modelling. Prediction is an intrinsic property of the brain that never stops. A misprediction (usually) causes you to attend to the error and update your model.
Suppose we define science as any process that achieves better map-territory convergence (i.e. minimise predictive error). In that case, it is uncontroversial to say that we are all, necessarily, engaged in the scientific process at all times, whether we like it or not. Defining science this way, it is reasonable to say that no claim about reality is, in principle, outside the purview of science.
Moral Uncertainty claims that even with perfect epistemic and ontological certainty, we still have to deal with uncertainty about what to do. However, I’ve always struggled to see how the above claim about map-territory convergence applies to goal selection and morality. I am not claiming that goal selection and morality are necessarily outside the purview of science. I am just puzzled by this.
How can we make scientific claims about selecting goals? Can we derive an ought from an is? Is it nonsensical to try and apply science to goal selection and morality? I subscribe to physicalism, and I thus believe that goals, decisions and purposes are absurd notions when we boil them down to physics. My puzzlement could be pure illusory but, still, I am puzzled.
Right, something like “Some objective truths are outside of science’s purview” might have been a slightly better phrasing, but as the goal is to stay at the commonsense level, trying to parse this more precisely is probably out of scope anyway, so can as well stay concise...
But some stuff is explicitly outside of science’s purview, though not in the way you’re talking about here. That is, some stuff is explicitly about, for example, personal experience, which science has limited tools for working with since it has to strip away a lot of information in order to transform it into something that works with scientific methods.
Compare how psychology sometimes can’t say much of anything about things people actually experience because it doesn’t have a way to turn experience into data.
I think this might conflate “science” with something like “statistics”. It’s possible to study things like personal experience, just harder at scale.
The Hollywood-scientist example illustrates this, I think. Dr. Physicist finds something that wildly conflicts with her current understanding of the world, and would be hard to put a number on, so she concludes that it can’t and shouldn’t be reasoned about using the scientific method.