Upvoted, but I think there’s a fundamental error in this thinking. “Fiction” is not a binary, it’s a gradient (and likely multiple gradients on different dimensions of what updates one might make).
I have repeated some physics and chemistry experiments, and personally experienced a fair amount of things. Even this is fiction (my memory is imperfect, and in many cases imperfect in non-random biased ways). But it’s LESS fictional than a story or description that was DESIGNED to make me feel or update in a certain way. In the middle are fairly rigorous descriptions of evidence and inference available in history or engineering books.
My <mumble>-year old copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics says the boiling point of Helium at one atmosphere pressure is 4.216 degrees Kelvin. In some sense, this is fiction—I haven’t verified it, and I suspect that even the authors are trusting others rather than measuring it themselves. It’s not really helpful to CALL IT “fiction”, though. Intent, expected repeatability, and source all have to factor in to how much you can update on it, and it’s far more common to use “fiction” to mean “no claim of correlation to reality”.
And on the other side, for standard fiction, one CAN update on the author’s values and far-mode beliefs about how things COULD PLAUSIBLY happen. This isn’t evidence of what DID happen, but I’ve definitely updated my ideas about the variety of human experience and motivation based on work that is acknowledged as fictional.
Agreed with all said. Maybe I wrote it not clearly enough. But where is a fundamental error? I agreed with multidimensionality of any book or for that matter event, and don’t think of it as one-dimensional.
A lot of currently available “non-fiction” gives not more updates of reality than some fiction.
By the way Mathematics is one of the few fields where you can and have to check everything by yourself from the first principles. In Physics it is harder.
Upvoted, but I think there’s a fundamental error in this thinking. “Fiction” is not a binary, it’s a gradient (and likely multiple gradients on different dimensions of what updates one might make).
I have repeated some physics and chemistry experiments, and personally experienced a fair amount of things. Even this is fiction (my memory is imperfect, and in many cases imperfect in non-random biased ways). But it’s LESS fictional than a story or description that was DESIGNED to make me feel or update in a certain way. In the middle are fairly rigorous descriptions of evidence and inference available in history or engineering books.
My <mumble>-year old copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics says the boiling point of Helium at one atmosphere pressure is 4.216 degrees Kelvin. In some sense, this is fiction—I haven’t verified it, and I suspect that even the authors are trusting others rather than measuring it themselves. It’s not really helpful to CALL IT “fiction”, though. Intent, expected repeatability, and source all have to factor in to how much you can update on it, and it’s far more common to use “fiction” to mean “no claim of correlation to reality”.
And on the other side, for standard fiction, one CAN update on the author’s values and far-mode beliefs about how things COULD PLAUSIBLY happen. This isn’t evidence of what DID happen, but I’ve definitely updated my ideas about the variety of human experience and motivation based on work that is acknowledged as fictional.
Agreed with all said. Maybe I wrote it not clearly enough. But where is a fundamental error? I agreed with multidimensionality of any book or for that matter event, and don’t think of it as one-dimensional.
A lot of currently available “non-fiction” gives not more updates of reality than some fiction.
By the way Mathematics is one of the few fields where you can and have to check everything by yourself from the first principles. In Physics it is harder.