Truth poll

[ciphergoth]

I should really post this on a Monday but I might as well do it now. A whole bunch of assertions to do with truth that it occurred to me to poll about...

[Poll #1365485]

Comments

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Where science fails to grasp what it reaches for, other approaches may be needed

I'm not sure this question as phrased can be discussed in a rational manner ;-)

I'd be happy to say that if those other approaches work, they *are* science... but the terms of the debate are so loaded at this point that many people would react to that as outright cultural appropriation, with Science as the privileged culture.

I guess the trick is distinguishing between science-the-practice and science-the-category-of-techniques-that-have-certain-properties.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

I took the question to be referring to scientific method, basically formulating beliefs through inability to falsify them through repeatable observation/experimentation.

In that sense, even the discovery of mathematical truths wouldn't count as it's in a different category.

But I think a lot of everyday beliefs are even less scientifically based.

When I'm forming a belief about what another person is like I'm unlikely to be applying scientific method. It's never that rigorous and often it might even be based on inexplicable cues about a person that I'm only semi-concious of.

My beliefs about myself are often based on introspection. My beliefs about epistemology and metaphysics are based solely on reason rather than empirical data.

Even my beliefs about scientific truth will be based on what I take to be an authoritative source on whether scientific method has been observed rather than any direct empirical evidence.