Must Scientific Knowledge Be Considered Relative?

Note that the word "information" is used in the first line of your quotation, and that is always relative, (as indeed is the word "data"). Ultimately, we can't get past relative to the needs of humans.

Shoud that be humen ?

Yep. That's what I meant by "insofar as the human mind can approach objectivity." All our experiences, as far as I can tell, are necessarily (by definition?) subjective. The reaching out to other minds for empirical corroboration is about as good as we can do, I think. It sure seems to work better than the faith-based approach, with regards to constructing an internally consistent model of the world (of experience).

I don't care what the dictionay says! I look at how science works and how and by whom and for what purpose it was formed.

I have found, it really is an, albeit disguised, religion.

Most scientist are very very religious when it comes to 'science'!
They will defend their extremely stupid theories till the end.

Even if that were true, some other scientist working in the same area would LOOVE to show and prove how someones "stupid" theory is flawed.
Science is, after all, populated by pwrsonalities. Being remembered as a guy who upended EVOLUTION or the Big BAng would make ones career. One would become instantly famous .

So you are saying that, in reality, thatALL l scientists arepart of an evil cabal to withhold information and Applications of "real science"?


You must realize that you are quite fucked up in that assembly of how you arrive at that kind of thinking.


FOR EXAM{PLE, from a recent real world event.
Two scientists spent about 10 years (TOTAL) working on a search for evidence that would result in finding transitional fossils that would clearly define the break between ancient FISH and the first AMPHIBIANS. The two scientists knew the time period they should be looking in, they knew several possible places to look(from studying world wide geologic maps), and even so they made two wrong sie guesses before they found out where to look. SO they then spent another 3 years searching for an elusive clue, and in 2003 they found an entire batch of complete transitional fossils that showed both fish-like and amphibian traits in one.

They received all kinds of notoriety and recognition for finding the transition between the two.

Then in 2009, another bunch of scientists found an even earlier fossil that showed even better transitional features (And it was from an earlier aged sediment).
Then these guys got a lot of notoriety and the first two guys were overlooked as "irrelevant". They became a footnote.
THEN in 2010, another team of scientists found a bunch of "Footprints" (no fossils) that suggested that (MAYBE) an early form of a tetrapod was walking on the mudflats about 10 million years earlier, thus pushing BACK, any fossil transitional form until someone now concentrates on the sedimentary unit that is earlier than the previous two layers.(In defense of the first two guys, there is no convincing vidence that these foot prints aren't anything but trackways of lungfish which were already known in this time)
SO NOW, we have some new scientists who are receiving notoriety and recognition for "finding" something important in the search for transitional fossils.

What happened was that the rules of how fossils are formed and how evolution works is messy with parent species surviving beyond the time that defined a"clear transition" into a higher form. Whereas newspapers and popular science press like Sci American and others want quick NEWS for the non scientist public. So the discoveries are "packaged" in small non technical bites and everybody believes they've learnt something.

So here we have a bunch of scientists, some newly recognized and others being forgotten because their work MAY now be irrelevant and unspectacular. The public wants ONE missing link, they don't want to understand how biology works

There is no cabal in science. It is cut-throat and discoveries are held tight to the chest until they can be presented to the world and ones fame is guaranteed. So, if overturning any law or theory in science was even possible, whoever does the "turning-over" would be up there with Newton. or Einstein , Hawking ,or Darwin and those old guys would then become irrelevant like the fossil hunters Ive just recounted to you

That's the reality, and what you propose is garbage thinking. Youre gonna have to deal with reality sooner or later.
Im jut here amazed at how your "wrongheaded thinking" is portrayed as facts strait from your mind.

Its a good thing that you aren't trained in science or youd probably be even more dissociated from reality than you are,what with all the competition and ridicule youd receive.

I gotta say:
I have a warm, loving appreciation of my anonymity.
I think its TERRIFIC to be able to walk down a public street without being singled out.

When I was younger, if I had been appointed (for instance) to the USSC,
of course I 'd have to accept it because of the good I cud do
in restoring America to the libertarian, anti-collectivist filosofy
of the Founders and the Sons of Liberty, but I 'd deem that to be a nasty sacrifice of my beloved anonymity.





David

Surely these "scientists" were well paid to create a 10 years research looking in places "known" by evolutionists, as critical places to invent a theory.

Look, upheavals are the worst nightmare for archeologists and geologists. You can't define without doubt which layer really existed before the another. A complete dinosaur with crocodile head alike skeleton was discovered right over the surface rather than in layers under skeletons of more recent species. This is how our planet plays games with us like crazy.

You are assuming -correctly by definition alone- that species pass thru transitions into higher forms, however, reality is different. Species only DECAY, and there are no exceptions for this degenerate trait. The only way to lean on transitions, which is not possible to find, is to uncover the complete set of transitions in a sole area, not from one place here and another place there.

Actually, you see fish trying to walk on ground, and amphibians living in water, you see mammals who were ground species and now they are known as sea lion, sea tiger, sea whatever, and you can observe that their extremities changed from walking on ground to move in water.

And you don't need any transition of several generations for this kind of changes, but just a birth defect that will force you to adapt to a different environment.

This is why RECYCLING is the most appropriate term to define the transitions rather than the obsolete "evolution".

So, if we talk about people disassociated with reality, your message belongs to one of them, not because you didn't know but because your ignorance comes from wrong learning.

Scientists do not 'create' anything. All they can do is use what's available in terms of fossils and what they deem as similar enough to be transitional.

If you refute their findings, show us why based on their findings?

Using adhoms is not refutation of anything.

*cough* If nothing else, watch it for the background music (wish it'd been the Buddy Miles version, though):

I see, we have your opinions, shall we move on?
Theres so much silly bullshit in your post that to address it would actually gives it credibility.
I think Ill pass.

u too

I suppose that since Science studies the relations between all facets of reality, it is essentially relativistic in its functions and goals. Only mystical "knowledge"--the sense of Reality's Unity is Absolute.

Not necessarily- might these relations be objective? If anything, it would be almost pointless trying to study science if there was no hope of obtaining definite answers, which (perhaps unlike philosophy) is what it is often seen as being meant to do.

Must we equate objective and absolute with real? Cannot real and objective be relativistic and even subjective? Remember Searle's comment (I wish I remembered where) that everything is subjective and that's an objective fact.
Oh, and we do not "study science" except as academic subject matter. Scienitsts DO Science.

...but you did reply...just sayin...

It's all subjective. That's the reason everybody has different ideas about what reality is. What we consider to be objective depends on the perceiver.

we are really are still talking religion here!

LMAO

Where did you study English?

Let me interject a post I presented elsewhere some time back. It might receive a more aggressive response here:

"An observation that I've made over my years of participation in these philosophy forums is so obvious that I'm afraid it may be banal for most of our A2K philosophers; I just hope they will add to and refine said observations.
It seems to me that we tend to almost metaphysically bifurcate reality into opposing categories: the advocates or practicioners of subjectivism or idealism VERSUS objectivism or reaism (in the 60s and 70s social scientists where I studied expressed this as materialism vs. mentalism ); absolutism, which is compatible with various forms of "essentialism", vs. relativism, often expressed as contextualism. Objectivists seem to inhabit a Newtonian world in which substantial "things" and structures move about in an imagined quasi-void while ontological relativists seem to inhabit a world of ever-changing PROCESSES in which "becoming" (rather than being) occurs in a condition of ontological impermanence. There is also a strong tendency to divide human reality into an essentialism emphasizing the predominance of NATURE vs. the artificialism or constructivism of CULTURE. Everyone acknowledges the reality of both, but we tend to weight them differenly.
I am exaggerating of course: no-one is wholly on one side or the other. We are in a sense amphibians occupying two kinds of reality simultaneously, but most of us, with the obvious exceptions of the more mystically inclined among us, make a dualistic distinction between our world INSIDE (subjectivism) and our world OUTSIDE (objectivism) , no doubt a tendency strengthened in the West by Descartes.
What I find most interesting in this pattern is that it seems to reflect a fundamental dualism running deep within us. We spontaneously (perhaps as a personality trait) emphasize either subjectivism/ relativism/ idealism, etc. or we emphasize objectivism/ absolutism/ realism, etc..
We seem to do this in a manner similar to the way we deal with the ambiguous illusions presented us by the Necker Cube and the Rubin Vase."

Where did you study English?


Why?