Science Forums 2

[Kriminal99]

Modern science is no more succesful then other means of discovering the nature of the world around us would have been. You don't have any other systems to compare it with.

Personally I think that the attributes of science which would seperate it from any other large scale ways of thinking about how to understand the world around us that deal with philosophical dillemas like global skepticism (knowledge is the absence of dissenting information, you should try to disprove a theory through experimentation) are wrong.

For instance there is no such thing as a third person body of knowledge. You can't have scientists conduct experiments and then give the results to non scientists as if they conducted the experiments themselves. One because the scientists may have biases that you might not have, and two because there is no such thing as an authoritative source. Trying to emphasize one theory over another or threatening or encouraging phds to come to agreement to cause less confusion is not a valid tactic either. The fact that not all scientists agree on things naturally shows that they are not even competent to serve as authoritative sources, even if the biases were not an issue.

edited for unnecessary quote