From Julia Shaw at Scientific American:
I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year. I wrote a whole science book, The Memory Illusion, almost never mentioning the terms fact and truth. Why? Because much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist. At least not in the way we commonly think of them.
We think of a fact as an irrefutable truth. According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is “a thing that is known or proved to be true.” And where does proof come from? Science?
Well, let me tell you a secret about science; scientists don’t prove anything. What we do is collect evidence that supports or does not support our predictions. Sometimes we do things over and over again, in meaningfully different ways, and we get the same results, and then we call these findings facts.
If only scientists did indeed spend more time doing that instead of shoring up failing ideas to keep their jobs.
What Shaw has to say isn’t altogether dismissible. We’re all tired of people claiming to have the Facts vs. the Myths but that is hardly because facts do not exist. What is one to make of
So, it’s ok that society is post-fact. Facts are so last century. More.
By the way Shaw, how are those plans coming for the war on mathematics? Decimal points are examples of hierarchy and privilege, right? And percentages are examples of exclusion… one could go on, but then so could any homework challenged baby asshat looking for excuses.
See also: Evolution bred a sense of reality out of us NPR’s Adam Frank: I find the logic in Hoffman’s ideas both exciting and potentially appealing because of other philosophical biases I carry around in my head. (But he suspects the theory is ultimately wrong.)
and
Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth.
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“much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist”
Not to belabor the obvious, but this statement fails the self-referential incoherence test. For it to be true, it must be false.
lol No, you’re not.
See comment #1.
Andrew
George Orwell was right. “1984” was prophetic.
Indeed… However, it is self-evidently true that none of us know all truth. But life experience teaches us we can at least know the truth about some things. For example, yesterday I had a dream that my long departed orange pet cat was still alive and had jumped up on top of the book shelf. When I woke up I understood that was irrefutably and factually not true and that I had only dreamed it. But to claim that nobody knows any truth, isn’t that the same as the claim you know all truth? After all to make the claim that there is no truth is to claim you have to have a universal knowledge of truth. (Only God can make such a claim.)
It seems to me that me that this is little more than pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-humble posturing, on Ms. Shaw’s part, which paradoxically leads to a kind of smug arrogance. Of course, I wouldn’t want to accuse her of being a know-it-all. It would be interesting, however, to see how she would defend herself.
Can this ‘relativistic’ nonsense be compared against Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” ?
Anyway, what else is new?
Welcome to this lost world.
It ain’t gonna get better than this before the end of the current age of grace.
One day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Christ is Lord.
Meanwhile we are going to see human stupidity all around.
Here’s a suggestion for reading as a mild antidote against relativism and other worldly ‘-isms’: Dr. Armand Nicholi’s “The Question of God”, nonfiction based on the contrasting biographies of a Briton and a German man. It’s been around for some time, but still worth reading.
ellijacket @ 3: Indeed. Shocking how easily the masses are manipulated. Political propaganda is almost inescapable these days. Televisions are everywhere (airports, hotel lobbies, restaurants, bars, etc.) and almost all networks have become part of the political propaganda machine.
Did she actually say those kinds of things somewhere? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Julia Shaw accepts at least one fact as an undeniable given in order to declare everything else to be non-factual.
In the title of her article, and in the first 3 sentences of her second paragraph, she mentions “I’m” or “I” five different times.
Thus Julia Shaw is obviously dependent on at least one ‘fact’. The ‘fact’ that she really exists as a real person who is capable of making a judgment, and definitively claiming, that she has found all other facts to be, basically, unreliable and illusory and therefore to be ‘non-factual’.
Decartes and Chalmers make exactly this point
Here are a few more related quotes:
The ‘fact’ that we really exist as real person is the most certain ‘fact’ we can possibly know about reality. Indeed, we have first hand experience of being real persons every moment of our waking lives. All of science is dependent on the concept of personhood.
Yet no one has ever conducted a scientific experiment to prove that we really exist as real persons. We can only point to scientific evidence that tentatively supports the fact of ‘personhood’ which we all, (save for atheists), accept as a undeniable given.
As mentioned, everybody accepts personhood as a undeniable given save for Atheists. In what I consider to be a shining example of poetic justice, in their claim that God does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion, the Atheistic naturalist also ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion. Here are a few quotes to that effect,,,
In ‘fact’, it is impossible for Atheists to live out their stated worldview that they do not really exist as real persons:
Dawkins himself admitted that his life would be ‘intolerable’ if his Atheistic worldview were actually true
In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
Julie, whom I, minus any experimental evidence, firmly believe to be a real person, goes on to state,,
As pointed out on another thread this morning, whilst the ‘law of gravity’ is subject to falsification by experimental testing, Darwinian evolution is basically a non-falsifiable pseudo-science with no rigid mathematical basis to rigorously test against.
Julia Shaw, given all her hype that facts don’t actually exist, goes on to concede that science, none-the-less, reveals ‘what the universe actually looks like’,,
Thus, despite her main claim that ‘I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year’, the ‘fact’ of the matter is that, as she herself admits, she has not completely abandoned ‘facts and “the truth”’. But indeed believes science is slowly approaching ‘the truth’.
i.e. She indeed admits that facts are being accumulated in science which are leading us to some sort of ultimate truth.
Mathematicians and Physicists strongly believe that that ‘ultimate truth’ in science will one day be found in the quote unquote ‘Theory of Everything’ that they are searching for.
Yet besides the fact that Godel, via his incompleteness theorem, proved there will never be a mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’,,,
,,, Yet besides the fact that Godel, via his incompleteness theorem, proved there will never be a mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’, the belief that there can even be a ‘Theory of Everything’, unbeknownst to most scientists working on string theory and the like, is a belief that can only be firmly grounded in Theism. That is to say, ‘the truth’ that science is ultimately driving at will be, and is only to be, found within Theism.
The main goal of all purported ‘Theories of Everything’ right now is to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into the purported mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’.
And whereas, special relativity, by ‘brushing infinity under the rug’, has been successfully unified with quantum theory to produce Quantum Electrodynamics,,,
And whereas, special relativity, by ‘brushing infinity under the rug’, has been successfully unified with quantum theory to produce Quantum Electrodynamics, no such mathematical ‘sleight of hand’ exists for general relativity. General relativity simply refuses to be mathematically unified with quantum mechanics. String theory is one, of several, attempts to, by hook or by crook, mathematically unify the two theories,
Some theoretical physicists have remarked that this failure to mathematically unify Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is ‘the collapse of physics as we know it’
Yet, if we rightly let the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into the picture of modern physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned, (Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Planck, among others), then an empirically backed reconciliation between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity is readily achieved for us in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Specifically, we have evidence that both Gravity and Quantum Mechanics were dealt with in Christ’s resurrection from the dead:
Verses and Music:
SA: “Did she actually say those kinds of things somewhere? I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Julia Shaw didn’t say any such thing in the American Scientific article and I couldn’t find any other reference to this. But if you read the entire article it’s quite reasonable and not necessarily unfriendly to ID. I think it’s actually quite a good explanation of how science works (or at least should work!).
Fordgreen at 11: It doesn’t sound like you mean the same thing by the initials ID as we are accustomed to around here. We mean following the evidence wherever it leads, not claiming that one doesn’t believe in facts. She may mean well, who knows, but she is pretty confused. And there are lots of people out there who would enjoy confusing her further. There are indeed people who don’t like math. Too rigid.
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So the question becomes: What motivates a religious devotion to obviously incoherent ideas in people like Julia Shaw?
Andrew
I’m actually going to go easy on the lady author. There are cultures that do not place nearly as much emphasis on the ‘actual existence’ of facts as our culture, and that instead are concerned with shades of meaning. You could argue that one of the reasons for the widening political divide in this country is the obsession with ‘facts’ and the claim that one side has all the ‘facts’ correct. We’ve seen it on here that the ‘facts’ of Darwinian evolution and its ‘reality’ are really only accessible to people who in ‘fact’ have an advanced degree in evolutionary biology such as N. Matzke. And these ‘facts’ and the reasons for their existence are inaccessible to people with multiple doctorates such as James Tour because of the ‘fact’ that they do not have the requisite advanced degree.
On the other hand yours truly believes in truth where at one time I did not. It may be that the truth of the existence of our spiritual nature that survives death is a different kind of truth than the everyday encounter of it. The ‘truth’ of someone committing first degree murder by pulling a trigger depends upon the ‘truth’ that a jury has the ability to determine what exactly is in the mind of the perpetrator, which is a fairly tenuous thing.
Many people make a critical mistake when thinking about such things. At some point, they surrendered to the idea that “science is the only means of arriving at truth”. Then they rightly thought about that and discovered that science doesn’t actually arrive at truths (or facts as she says). So then they have to conclude “there is no way of knowing truth or facts about anything”.
All of this stems from a false first principle. Start badly, end badly in this case. The claim that science is the only means of truth is incoherent. Science cannot evaluate the truth of that statement.
Some is a religious committment to secularism or atheism. Other is just poor education. That is, no education at all in philosophy, must less in theology. Those are essential subject areas needed for understanding the world and reality and most public spokespersons and even academics have no knowledge of either.
BA77 @ 8: “Thus Julia Shaw is obviously dependent on at least one ‘fact’. The ‘fact’ that she really exists as a real person who is capable of making a judgment…”
True indeed. But like similar thinkers, the irony (and error) will be completely missed.
Of related note from an earlier post:
although the vast majority of what it truly means to be human will forever be beyond the grasp of scientific explanation, none-the-less, science, particularly math, has been fairly successful in validating the Christian Theist’s claim that mind precedes, and is irreducible to, material reality.
As to: “Natural science cannot fully comprehend human nature”
Here is a poem that captures the essence of that thought:
Silver Asiatic @17.
Interesting comment. Thank you.
OT:
“What we do is collect evidence that supports or does not support our predictions.”
Well, that’s true of academic “scientists”. They determine which theory is most fashionable among grantors, then create bizarre delusions and psychotic monstrosities to “support” the grantable theory.
Actual scientists, working in industry and medicine, don’t use predictions or theories AT ALL. They try to solve a real problem or cure a real disease or improve a real product or technique. They try various methods and materials to solve the problem, and measure the results precisely.
I’m glad she set the record straight. But why did she think it was worth doing?
Andere @ 23: Exactly.
Come on, it is very obvious that mathematics itself is the theory of everything.
The overwhelming success of mathematics in science points to this being true. And obviously it’s not going to be like 42 will be the theory of everything. The answer in maths will not be a random number like that, the answer obviously has to be with 0.
Start with some arbitrary symbol, call it 0 if you will, then derive other numbers and mathematical operators in a logical way from this symbol. That is approximate to what the theory of everything will look like.
Creatio ex nihilo, ex nihilo nihil fit.
The universe starts from nothing and can only be nothing in total. The main ordering of the universe is the same as the main ordering in mathematics.
The operation of cause and effect is to total nothing. An action has an equal and opposite reaction, totalling zero. It means there are no causes without effects, nor effects without causes, a cause with it’s accompany effect is one thing chosen.
So there is a main structure to the universe mirroring the main structure in mathematics, the options to which are only for it to be or not be, and there are no more possibilities than that. Apart from the main structure there are many possible ways for the universe to turn out.
The DNA system has the same ordering as the universe whole, meaning that the DNA system is a world in it’s own right operation like human imagination or a 3D computergame world. In principle one could just as well put a working model of a jumbo jet in the DNA system, the DNA system is universal in this way, still, the jumbo jet cannot be grown from DNA.
I wonder what percentage of those celebrating the joys of a “post-truth society” are simultaneously whining over Donald Trump’s (perceived) lies?
Given both sides are dominated by leftist imbeciles, I’m guessing that number’s pretty damn close to 100%.
I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year. I wrote a whole science book, The Memory Illusion, almost never mentioning the terms fact and truth. Why? Because much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist. At least not in the way we commonly think of them.
Instead of using the term “factual relativist”, why not say “…I will deny, dilute and oppose any accepted facts as truth just to prove my point…”??? It just would be so much easier to understand why someone would be so …… ..
Unless this someone is a an atheistic cat lover who despises anything to do with religion and yet becomes like a child around Christmas time and forgets himself and really gets into the “Christmas spirit” ignoring the fact that he is not suppose to celebrate it because just like Santa Clause and unicorns Christmas is not really real…
Anybody can remember the term to call such a individual?
I guess factual relativism already existed in times of Jesus when the Pharisees witnessed Jesus’ miracles and yet they tried to ‘deny, dilute and oppose’ the facts that Jesus resurrected many dead people, one of them being dead for 4 days…
John 9:16
“16 Because of this, some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for He does not keep the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a sinful man perform such signs?” And there was division among them.”
Here is something interesting to consider now that we are all living in Ms. Shaw’s post-factual world. (At least according to her.) Look at the following picture. How many young women are sitting on the couch? Now how many pairs of legs do you see?
http://i.ndtvimg.com/i/2016-12.....831476.jpg
Is that the way the world really (factually) is or is your mind/brain deceiving you?
Here is a video of the same girls, same pose etc. Is there a rational explanation? Keep watching and you will see.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/526.....show-clips
To lie is to speak with disregard to truth in the hope that what is said or suggested will be taken as true — origin unknown. Where, truth says of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not — per Ari. And, facts, are things credibly known to be so or to have occurred, especially matters of actual experience (and testimony or record), observation and the like. To try to live life by fantasy and falsehood is to brook a march of folly to ruin. KF
What a funny thread !
‘Not to belabor the obvious, but this statement fails the self-referential incoherence test. For it to be true, it must be false.’
That’s a keeper, Barry ! And that’s a fact. Ooh errrr….
And asauber’ riposte xould hardly be improved upon !
What a funny thread !
‘Not to belabor the obvious, but this statement fails the self-referential incoherence test. For it to be true, it must be false.’
That’s a keeper, Barry ! And that’s a fact. Ooh errrr….
And asauber’ riposte could hardly be improved upon !