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[Morrigan Stark]

I don't associate any of these people with "rationalism". To my knowledge "rationalist" is not a label any of them are in the habit of using. I know that at least James Randi, Phil Plait, and Rebecca Watson tend to prefer "skeptic". PZ Myers seems to primarily talk about himself as an atheist or maybe humanist. Tyson is more of a general science advocate in his public role. I don't know much about Ben Goldacre but the stuff he does looks a lot like the sort of skeptical advocacy that the other three skeptics you named do a lot of.

But anyway, of course labels are mostly about identifying with the other people using the label. I mean, what's the alternative and what's the point? Who's deciding what a label is actually about? These things don't have official definitions apart from whatever the people using them stand for.

Yes, they are skeptics. I was under the impression that skeptics/rationalists were more or less the same thing, that both value evidence and empiricism as a means to acquire and adjust knowledge. If rationalism means something else, then uh... I guess I've been confused about that term all these years.

 

[Kart94]

They were probably always irrational. It is just that they stopped beating up on easy punching bags like Creationists.

 

[umop_3pisdn]

Yes, they are skeptics. I was under the impression that skeptics/rationalists were more or less the same thing, that both value evidence and empiricism as a means to acquire and adjust knowledge. If rationalism means something else, then uh... I guess I've been confused about that term all these years.

The terms rationalism and empiricism are usually used disjunctively, this is because of an argument in early modern philosophy about whether knowledge can be possible in advance of experience or not. That issue has been more or less 'settled' (as much as anything is ever settled in philosophy) since the early 19th century, and now we're more likely to use the terms to express intellectual preferences or temperaments. For example, rationalists tend to prefer the 'essences' of things, are more inclined to intellectual abstraction, and tend to be more systematic and prioritize internal consistency above all else. Empiricists then are usually more interested in developing natural laws from concrete experience (they prefer 'actuality' to 'essence'), are more 'ad hoc' in their solutions, and care more about external standards than whether some theory is consistent or not. Basically, even though the epistemological problem that made this dichotomy is widely not recognized as a problem anymore, they're still used more or less exclusively to refer to someone that prefers either theory or fact, respectively. Rationalists usually make up your philosophers and social theorists and empiricists usually make up your scientists.

 

[Gotchaye]

Yes, they are skeptics. I was under the impression that skeptics/rationalists were more or less the same thing, that both value evidence and empiricism as a means to acquire and adjust knowledge. If rationalism means something else, then uh... I guess I've been confused about that term all these years.

"Rationalism" has a mostly-archaic sense which iamblades describes. Nowadays I think it's mostly used by people who kind of resemble historical rationalists but who add a bunch of other ideological positions. It's the RationalWiki and LessWrong crowd. In many ways they do look like skeptics, but they tend to be (1) very strong utilitarians (or something similarly bean-county), (2) relatively more concerned with hypothetical doomsday scenarios (e.g., evil AI or a massive asteroid impact) than present misuses of reason, and (3) much more concerned with error than fraud. They tend to be much more philosophically-minded while also believing that they can come to know a lot of philosophical truths in a basically scientific way. So, like, where skeptics tend to say that you're just not going to be able to definitely figure out what's moral using the same sort of toolbox we've got for claims about the world, Sam Harris' position is basically that we can say because of science that utilitarianism is objectively true.

 

[Morrigan Stark]

The terms rationalism and empiricism are usually used disjunctively, this is because of an argument in early modern philosophy about whether knowledge can be possible in advance of experience or not. That issue has been more or less 'settled' (as much as anything is ever settled in philosophy) since the early 19th century, and now we're more likely to use the terms to express intellectual preferences or temperaments. For example, rationalists tend to prefer the 'essences' of things, are more inclined to intellectual abstraction, and tend to be more systematic and prioritize internal consistency above all else. Empiricists then are usually more interested in developing natural laws from concrete experience (they prefer 'actuality' to 'essence'), are more 'ad hoc' in their solutions, and care more about external standards than whether some theory is consistent or not. Basically, even though the epistemological problem that made this dichotomy is widely not recognized as a problem anymore, they're still used more or less exclusively to refer to someone that prefers either theory or fact, respectively.

Well uh... okay. I just don't think this refers to the kind of people described in the OP at all then? Dawkins, Shermer, Harris, etc.

 

[umop_3pisdn]

Well uh... okay. I just don't think this refers to the kind of people described in the OP at all then? Dawkins, Shermer, Harris, etc.

Well I somewhat exaggerated the differences for effect. Most people would be some kind of accidental mixture of both temperaments, because we want the best of both and probably haven't thought that much in terms of either 'rationalism' or 'empiricism' to systematically exclude the other. I mean most people these days wouldn't see the value in characterizing themselves as either a rationalist or an empiricist because we don't experience that distinction with the same kind of urgency that formed it.

I'm not familiar with the thought of those three, but if their handling of some problem could be considered largely 'theoretical', then we could probably consider them something like a rationalist too, at least with respect to that problem. Rationalists are basically the armchair types, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way, a lot of important thinking happens in armchairs.

 

[Sianos]

From Fallacies of Compression, a section of A Human's Guide to Words: relevant to how people fail to understand the need for words to exist in order to enable verbal or written communication, specifically about gender

"Expanding your map is (I say again) a scientific challenge: part of the art of science, the skill of inquiring into the world. (And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying "I can define a word any way I like".) Where you see a single confusing thing, with protean and self-contradictory attributes, it is a good guess that your map is cramming too much into one point—you need to pry it apart and allocate some new buckets. This is not like defining the single thing you see, but it does often follow from figuring out how to talk about the thing without using a single mental handle.

So the skill of prying apart the map is linked to the rationalist version of Taboo, and to the wise use of words; because words often represent the points on our map, the labels under which we file our propositions and the buckets into which we drop our information. Avoiding a single word, or allocating new ones, is often part of the skill of expanding the map."

I really need to come up with a (or steal someone else's) succinct way to express this concept so I can explain it verbally.

It's a shame this new band of foolish self-proclaimed "rationals" deem themselves too rational to engage in such menial tasks as "reading" or even "introspection". I guess RationalWiki and LessWrong can rebrand themselves as Semantic Justice Warriors to escape further co-opting.

 

[The Technomancer]

Man RationalWiki is so good.

 

[hirokazu]

I mean, it's not crazy to take Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as mainstream "rationalist" figures. Almost everyone I've ever heard identify themselves that way thinks highly of those two. Sam Harris types are easily the most prominent people associated with "rationalism". I'd say that "skeptic" is a more common identifier that isn't as closely tied to particular political views. But I don't read anything here or in the OP's article as characterizing skeptics as a whole in a certain way. It's clearly just true that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are big deals in "the skeptical community", though there are many that don't like them too.

Aren't skeptics and rationalists basically the same thing, or is this like how some people are adamant they're agnostic but not atheist? It's sad that such twats are seen as the voice of people who follow reason. I certainly don't think that highly of them.

I'm feeling like I'm missing something and rationalism doesn't mean what I think it means, or it's just been overrun by twats so much that I shouldn't associate with it.

 

[Cocaloch]

I do think it's important to use scientific principles for social sciences, and I imagine that's a fairly common belief that perhaps some find objectionable. They shouldn't!

It's very objectionable to say that we need to use "scientific" principles in the social sciences full stop. Various scientific methods can prove useful tools in various situations, and interdisciplinary work can be quite fruitful. That being said, not qualifying the use of these principles leads to positivism, which is pretty clearly a bad thing.

...What is "science worship"?

In any case, I can think of far worse things for society to be doing than glorifying science in goofy pop culture...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

It's incredibly problematic both for other fields, due to comparing them to a meaningless standard, and to various scientific fields themselves. For sciences to work, they need to not be held back by some silly nebulous idea of a platonic science existing in the ether, which is merely accessed by scientists.

 

[FiggyCal]

Their article was initially rejected by a journal, “NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies”. But they were referred to a smaller outlet, ‘Cogent Social Sciences’, that offers publication where you ‘pay what you like’ (apparently, they didn’t pay anything).

The journal apparently asked for $625 to publish the article, but the fee was paid off by a independent third party. So... these guys paid to have their sham paper published by a sham journal and that's proof that...?

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room...ct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/#note02

 

[SoCoRoBo]

From Fallacies of Compression, a section of A Human's Guide to Words: relevant to how people fail to understand the need for words to exist in order to enable verbal or written communication, specifically about gender

"Expanding your map is (I say again) a scientific challenge: part of the art of science, the skill of inquiring into the world. (And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying "I can define a word any way I like".) Where you see a single confusing thing, with protean and self-contradictory attributes, it is a good guess that your map is cramming too much into one point—you need to pry it apart and allocate some new buckets. This is not like defining the single thing you see, but it does often follow from figuring out how to talk about the thing without using a single mental handle.

So the skill of prying apart the map is linked to the rationalist version of Taboo, and to the wise use of words; because words often represent the points on our map, the labels under which we file our propositions and the buckets into which we drop our information. Avoiding a single word, or allocating new ones, is often part of the skill of expanding the map."

I really need to come up with a (or steal someone else's) succinct way to express this concept so I can explain it verbally.

It's a shame this new band of foolish self-proclaimed "rationals" deem themselves too rational to engage in such menial tasks as "reading" or even "introspection". I guess RationalWiki and LessWrong can rebrand themselves as Semantic Justice Warriors to escape further co-opting.

Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you, but I don't think there's anything in that paragraph supporting your conclusion. It seems to be calling for more words in order to better describe complex concepts.

What's being said is the correct point that often, especially in quick internet discourse, certain words become magnets for a huge variety of overlapping concepts, which leads to a lack of clarity and productivity in discussion. A term like neoliberalism, for instance, is used to refer to basically everything that has happened in almost every country in the world since the 1980s and has almost no set definition. It's a term that's crying out for disaggregation into a number of smaller, more distinct terms.

The reason this is important is that there's a constant problem on the left with a certain kind of dogmatism. The left is wonderful at identifying real problems but, having identified these problems, they then often ascribe them to spurious causes and as a consequence find it hard to formulate good policy remedies. Then, when those causes have been largely proven to be false or inaccurate, the left then doubles down and refuses to update its beliefs. If you couple that with the tendency for people on the left to absolutely excoriate people they disagree with in the modern era, it's a really terrible mix. It's not pedantry and nebbishness to want to try and talk about problems accurately because the consequence of formulating an incorrect policy proposal is that the problem doesn't get solved. People suffer more.

I mean, if we're happy to take the LessWrong crowd as emblematic of the rationalist movement, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a movement more committed to acquiring more knowledge, which certainly includes reading and introspection. It's one of the core tenets of the movement.

 

[boiled goose]

The idea that only STEM fields are valid. The idea that scientists are deities. The idea that science is separate from culture. All common beliefs that are all terrible.

And of course we can think of worse things! This is a pointless statement. The existence of Nazis does not preclude other bad or dumb things.

What society are you living in?

I see athletes and celebrities being worshipped. Not scientists.

 

[Farks!]

The "skeptic" community has turned into a garbage cesspool and should be avoided.

 

[Yoshi]

It's very objectionable to say that we need to use "scientific" principles in the social sciences full stop. Various scientific methods can prove useful tools in various situations, and interdisciplinary work can be quite fruitful. That being said, not qualifying the use of these principles leads to positivism, which is pretty clearly a bad thing.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

It's incredibly problematic both for other fields, due to comparing them to a meaningless standard, and to various scientific fields themselves. For sciences to work, they need to not be held back by some silly nebulous idea of a platonic science existing in the ether, which is merely accessed by scientists.

So, if you refute "scientism", which other way (other than scientific reasoning, measuring, deduction) can lead to actual knowledge?

 

[MadJackChurchill]

Boy oh boy, these sceptics sure are obnoxiously dogmatic about their western perspectival upbringing.

 

[Fuchsdh]

...What is "science worship"?

In any case, I can think of far worse things for society to be doing than glorifying science in goofy pop culture...

It's the replacement of blind faith in a higher power with blind faith in "science" as infallible and right, ignoring the fact that science is a process and prone to the biases of those involved in it.

 

[ModernBoxes]

ITT: A few people discuss the topic despite the pointed and presumptuous title, while a few others drop in with a one sentence two-cent attack to express their distain for the subjects and bail.

The trend of misfiring on reasonable thinkers that ask the hard questions needs to end. It's far more dangerous behavior to label someone you disagree with as EXTREME. It's insultingly lazy and is echoed by the drop in artists I mentioned above​.

It's perfectly okay to disagree and discuss except you poison the discussion from the get go. Somewhere along the line they said something that calls into question your objectivity. Now every semi controversial statement is blown out of proportion in an attempt to paint rationalists as irrational. Don't forget to mention they're atheists so you bring down their trustworthiness rating.

It's a very weird beast to read on GAF. I'm tempted to call it "extreme" but it's likely the new common behavior of lapping on blame wherever it can fit.

 

[SoCoRoBo]

It's the replacement of blind faith in a higher power with blind faith in "science" as infallible and right, ignoring the fact that science is a process and prone to the biases of those involved in it.

This is something frequently acknowledged by rationalists. It's one of the biggest preoccupations of the movement. I mean, I certainly think it's important to reflect on why certain areas are being studied/why certain pharmaceuticals developed etc. but this is something a lot of rationalists do. Many of the best criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry that I've seen have come from the rationalist community, particularly because they're committed to understanding the legal regime and incentives that these companies operate under.

I'd wager that the 'scientism' problem is something much more common to soft left liberals, who have a commitment to the scientific method that is partly based on the fact that right-leaning people are perceived not to. You don't see that too much on the hard left, dialectical materialism is the only science they need, baby!

 

[TheOfficeMut]

My experience has been that rationalists become extremely irrational once their worldview becomes exclusively black and white, devoid of nuance and subtlety.

 

[Skinpop]

Good correlative data of what? We don't even know how the mouse brain makes the simplest of computations. Genetic studies of what? What good does knowing that the D3 receptor allele XYZ is linked to higher intelligence when it really is dependent on being in X situation and comes with Y negative effects. Gender studies is not at all like intelligence science and is a non sequitur here.

Please don't just link wikipedia pages and point to the citations. Give me the primary sources that aren't slightly more advanced phrenology. More gray and white matter isn't a good thing!

Scientist have found 40 genes that are strongly associated with intelligence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27225129?otool=karolib&tool=karolinska
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/40-more-intelligence-genes-found

what do you think of this huge meta study that was published the other day?

Educational attainment is strongly influenced by social and other environmental factors, but genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals.

Our findings demonstrate that, even for a behavioural phenotype that is mostly environmentally determined, a well-powered GWAS identifies replicable associated genetic variants that suggest biologically relevant pathways.

Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heratiblity2 for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (rg = 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10−29).

 

[Morrigan Stark]

The "skeptic" community has turned into a garbage cesspool and should be avoided.

Yeah, no. Can we not?

 

[Riposte]

ITT: A few people discuss the topic despite the pointed and presumptuous title, while a few others drop in with a one sentence two-cent attack to express their distain for the subjects and bail.

The trend of misfiring on reasonable thinkers that ask the hard questions needs to end. It's far more dangerous behavior to label someone you disagree with as EXTREME. It's insultingly lazy and is echoed by the drop in artists I mentioned above​.

It's perfectly okay to disagree and discuss except you poison the discussion from the get go. Somewhere along the line they said something that calls into question your objectivity. Now every semi controversial statement is blown out of proportion in an attempt to paint rationalists as irrational. Don't forget to mention they're atheists so you bring down their trustworthiness rating.

It's a very weird beast to read on GAF. I'm tempted to call it "extreme" but it's likely the new common behavior of lapping on blame wherever it can fit.

This is an apt description. Seems like the title was a signal to some posters to say something trite (if not irrelevant) about Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or w/e.

My overall opinion on the prank is that it was little more than a potshot, not very definitive for or against the hoaxers. The larger context, which I think some of the backlash is missing, is that there has been increasing awareness (and, thus, antagonism) of post-structuralism/postmodernism academia and its problems (I've always liked what Chomsky said here). The biggest claims they make are based more on the exposure of perfectly legitimate papers and this just served as an extra insult, while not landing all too strong in itself. For what it's worth, the Harris and Dawking responses to it are basically "lol sounds about right", not "we have slain the beast!".


Anyway, here are two response articles, favorable and ambivalent at best, to follow up on this hoax/prank/StarDestroyerTakedown:

Sokal Affair 2.0: Penis Envy: Addressing Its Critics by Helen Pluckrose.

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" written by Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle is a peer-reviewed paper published by the online journal Cogent Social Science on 19th May, 2017. It is a rambling essay, filled with gender studies jargon, which took issue with the implications for trans and gender-queer individuals in regarding the penis as a male sexual organ and advocated understanding it ”conceptually" as a social construct. It went on to relate this ill-defined ”conceptual penis" to aggressive and abusive attitudes which it related to ”toxic masculinity" and ultimately blamed it for climate change. Later that day, Skeptic.com published a piece by the authors who revealed themselves to be the mathematician, James Lindsay, and the philosopher, Peter Boghossian and the paper to be a Sokal-style hoax. Their intention, they said, was to highlight two problems; the low standards of pay-to-publish journals and the meaningless nonsense that can be accepted by the social sciences in general and gender studies in particular, providing it upholds fashionable postmodern ideas of gender.

...

...This has produced much criticism of Cogent Social Science and also of the state of discourse within gender studies. It has also produced some criticism of the hoax and five primary objections can be distinguished.

The hoax isn't really a hoax because it makes a good argument.

The hoax targeted a bad journal which does not represent gender studies.

The hoax is a one-off and proves nothing.

The hoax is just another attack on the humanities/ Social Science by science.

The hoax was transphobic and sexist.

The hoax targeted a bad journal which does not represent gender studies.

In stark contradiction to the criticism above, many defenders of gender studies have claimed that Cogent Social Sciences is widely known to be a bad journal and more reputable ones would not have taken it seriously. The problem with that is that it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), ProQuest Social Science Journals, the British Library, Cabell's International and many more of the largest indices. It is not highlighted as a problem in the much-relied upon Beall's list of predatory journals and was recommended to Lindsay and Boghossian by the NORMA journal. It is part of the highly-regarded Taylor & Francis Group which confirms that Cogent offers thorough scholarly peer review and has all the ”traditional values and high standards associated with Taylor & Francis and Routledge at its core."

Even more significantly (and as shown by the first criticism), the language and ”argument" of the hoax piece is indistinguishable from sincere gender studies publications from a range of academic journals. The Twitter account New Real Peer Review, which is dedicated to highlighting ludicrous theses, spent much of the day demonstrating this. Here are just a few examples.

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/865962711766765575

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/865963436722835458

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/865965023612547076

In addition to this, critics desperate to defend the reputation of gender studies by claiming that the hoaxers approached a pay-to-publish journal with very low standards seem to have failed to comprehend that this was the other ”prong" of the two-pronged problem they intended to demonstrate existing in gender studies – the existence of pay-to-publish journals with very low standards. Job done.

The hoax is just another attack on the humanities/ Social Science by science.

https://twitter.com/mesosuchus/status/865686191374569472

This is an attempt to deflect attention from the reality of what happened to a tribalist ”two cultures" argument in which ”science" is argued to be the bully. This doesn't work for two reasons. Firstly, the perpetrators do not fit obligingly into the ”science" tribe. Peter Boghossian is a philosopher, and the effects of academic shift towards postmodern thinking are a topic entirely within his remit. James Lindsay is a mathematician but has researched solidly for years in the area of the psychology of religion and published a well-researched book on the topic. The fact that they both have respect for science and use it in their work should not be considered a black mark against them by those in the social sciences or humanities. The fact that this is so often received badly does not reflect well on those fields. Secondly, the hoax took place entirely within the realm of the social sciences, speaking its own language and operating on its own terms. The social sciences will have to take responsibility for the ideas it itself generates and approves.

that gender studies hoax is dumb, but look at this business model by epopp

Today's five-minute-hate is on gender studies, or people who dump on gender studies, depending on your POV. The short version for those of you not paying attention: A philosopher and a math PhD decided gender studies is dumb and ideological. They wrote up a jargon- and buzzword-filled article titled ”The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construction" and paid to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal no one's ever heard of. Ha ha ha! Take that, gender studies!

This is a stupid prank that has already been taken down in about five different places. I'm not going to bother with that.

But in looking at the original journal, I noticed this crazy business model they have. The journal, Cogent Social Sciences, is an open-access outlet published by Cogent OA. It charges $1350 to publish an article, unless you don't have $1350, in which case they'll take some unspecified minimum.

Okay, so far it sounds like every other scammy ”peer-reviewed" open access journal. But wait. Cogent OA, it turns out, is owned by Taylor & Francis, one of the largest academic publishers. Taylor & Francis owns Routledge, for instance, and publishes Economy and Society, Environmental Sociology, and Justice Quarterly, to pick a few I've heard of.

So get this: If your article gets rejected from one of our regular journals, we'll automatically forward it to one of our crappy interdisciplinary pay-to-play journals, where we'll gladly take your (or your funder's or institution's) money to publish it after a cursory ”peer review". That is a new one to me.

 

[Cocaloch]

So, if you refute "scientism", which other way (other than scientific reasoning, measuring, deduction) can lead to actual knowledge?

Why does refuting scientism, not quite sure why you put it in quotes since it isn't on very shaky ground as a word, mean that you don't think science is valuable? It's saying that science isn't the correct tool for every job. Sciences are great things that are incredibly useful for answering questions about their respective fields. They are less great for answering other sorts of questions.

But other kinds of questions demand other kinds of tools. Historical questions need historical methods, questions about the individual subjectivity require humanistic ones, so on and so forth. It's a bit odd you folded measuring and deduction into science when it doesn't have a monopoly on either.

Boy oh boy, these sceptics sure are obnoxiously dogmatic about their western perspectival upbringing.

Err are they? Seems to me like the opposite. Unless this is some rather bizarre sarcasm.

What society are you living in?

I see athletes and celebrities being worshipped. Not scientists.

Scientism is totally a very obvious thing. It's less about deifying scientists as much as mysticizing science in itself, and holding it up to be the one true epistemology.

 

[Telosfortelos]

It's very objectionable to say that we need to use "scientific" principles in the social sciences full stop. Various scientific methods can prove useful tools in various situations, and interdisciplinary work can be quite fruitful. That being said, not qualifying the use of these principles leads to positivism, which is pretty clearly a bad thing.

I disagree, and would be interested to hear examples of where you would suggest scientific principles should not be used in social sciences.

Edit: Missed your post right above mine. My apologies. How we address history, the level of confidence we have in facts, the way information changes through generations, the way subjectively told information is often skewed; those are all questions that deserve scientific rigor. Subjective experiences should also be measured and discussed with scientific rigor within academia. And no, it's not odd to discuss the ways in which we measure and deduce within the context of science, I strongly disagree with that. Science is simply the way in which we know the world around us.

 

[Cocaloch]

I disagree, and would be interested to hear examples of where you would suggest scientific principles should not be used in social sciences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

The other problem is the bigger epistemological one of assuming that science has an inherently better access to all truth than other things. This makes science into a monolith, it isn't, and involves misunderstanding other disciplines' methods and questions.The social sciences are the be "fixed" via positivism, and the humanities are to be discredited, since they are inherently unfixable by this understanding, a la this article.

 

[Skinpop]

I disagree, and would be interested to hear examples of where you would suggest scientific principles should not be used in social sciences.

I had a friend who was doing gender studies in the early 2000's. He would have answered with something like "the scientific method is a patriarchal power structure" and how what they are up to is redefining science and academia. Don't know if people are this hardcore nowadays though...

 

[Cocaloch]

Edit: Missed your post right above mine. My apologies. How we address history, the level of confidence we have in facts, the way information changes through generations, the way subjectively told information is often skewed; those are all questions that deserve scientific rigor.

There is a lot to unpack here. I agree rigor can be a good thing, but I'm not sure why rigor is scientific. To be historically rigorous is quite a different thing that being scientifically rigorous. Even if we accept your idea about scientific rigor being needed, how exactly does one apply scientific rigor to history? I have no historical experiments to design, no way to have controls.

Rigor itself has an interesting history, but it's far more mathematical and philosophical than it is scientific.

Subjective experiences should also be measured and discussed with scientific rigor within academia.

Maybe kinda sorta sometimes. That being said, this isn't always possible or even desirable.

And no, it's not odd to discuss the ways in which we measure and deduce within the context of science, I strongly disagree with that.

Within the contex of science isn't weird. But this isn't within that context. It's assuming measuring something is inherently scientific just because sciences measure things. We were measuring things long before science emerged.

Science is simply the way in which we know the world around us.

Ironically this could use some philosophical rigor. Is that really what science is? Or are sciences, notice the plural, a collection of disciplines that use interrelated, but distinct, approaches, and which all take various aspects of the natural world for their object of inquiry?

Things that aren't science aren't inherently bad because they aren't science, which seems to be the claim at the end of this line of thinking.

 

[AlimNassor]

This is a severe problem with a certain group that prides themselves as being,''alt-right''. The media posts an article saying X group are offended and protesting and the alt-right go ballistic. In reality its only a couple people up in arms but, the media thought it'd make a good story.

 

[Mr.Mike]

There is definitely a contingent of people who use the trappings of science and rationalism to front like their views are the one true view (and often these views are pretty reprehensible).

 

[Yoshi]

That's some kind of parody right? Irrational stuff like "the holocaust happened"?

 

[Fine Ham Abounds]

As a lifelong atheist steeped in things like Cosmos, the Ascent of Man, and Connections as a small child in the early 80s, it's been an astonishing sequence of events to watch the rise of seemingly rational antitheist sentiment into the mainstream and it's sudden, violent brain-ectomy upon collision with the wall of social justice.

 

[Telosfortelos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

The other problem is the bigger epistemological one of assuming that science has an inherently better access to all truth than other things. This makes science into a monolith, it isn't, and involves misunderstanding other disciplines' methods and questions.The social sciences are the be "fixed" via positivism, and the humanities are to be discredited, since they are inherently unfixable by this understanding, a la this article.

Science certainly doesn't justify eugenics. That's ridiculous to suggest. If supporters of eugenics claimed it did, that makes them wrong and no less horrible for being wrong.

There is a lot to unpack here. I agree rigor can be a good thing, but I'm not sure why rigor is scientific. To be historically rigorous is quite a different thing that being scientifically rigorous. Even if we accept your idea about scientific rigor being needed, how exactly does one apply scientific rigor to history? I have no historical experiments to design, no way to have controls.

Science is critical for the archaeological record that supports the written historical record. It can also tell us a lot about bias, and has much to say about the limits of biased information. When we speak about the historical record, we speak about what was written, not what was. I don't see what's not scientific about that.

Rigor itself has an interesting history, but it's far more mathematical and philosophical than it is scientific.

I'm sincerely interested in learning more. Any authors you would recommend or things I could lookup ?

Ironically this could use some philosophical rigor. Is that really what science is? Or are sciences, notice the plural, a collection of disciplines that use interrelated, but distinct, approaches, and which all take various aspects of the natural world for their object of inquiry?

Good point, the nature of what we know is subjective and isn't nearly as rigorous as academic work. I would have been better off stating something like "science is the set of tools for understanding the world" or somesuch.

Things that aren't science aren't inherently bad because they aren't science, which seems to be the claim at the end of this line of thinking.

There are wonderful things that I don't consider scientific. Art, love, the act of thinking about something, subjective feelings. Those are wonderful things! They're also not academic, and when studied within academia, I would expect scientific tools to be applied.

And I'm not arguing that science can remove the need for suppositions (value suppositions or orthers).

This obviously isn't something I'm an expert about, however, and I'd love to hear a convincing argument about something in particular (abstract arguments aren't likely to convince me) that should be studied by some means other than science.

 

[Cocaloch]

Science certainly doesn't justify eugenics. That's ridiculous to suggest. If supporters of eugenics claimed it did, that makes them wrong and no less horrible for being wrong.

Science doesn't today, but it absolutely did in the early 20th century. It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. In fact, it was so on the bleeding edge of science that its creation was considered a sign of intellectual maturity for America. Finally the nation had produced serious large scale science.

Science is critical for the archaeological record that supports the written historical record. It can also tell us a lot about bias, and has much to say about the limits of biased information. When we speak about the historical record, we speak about what was written, not what was. I don't see what's not scientific about that.

If you read my posts in this thread you'll see I am fully in support of supplementing work using scientific methods. I do this in my own work with anthropogenic climate change. That being said this is very different than suggesting that the social sciences need to be more scientific. As for bias, that's an odd point. Generally most humanists and social sciences understanding of bias is much more humanistic than scientific.

As for your last point how is talking about something that was written scientific? I honestly don't understand what kind of conception of science would lead to that thought. Either way, I don't consider myself a scientist and I doubt you'll find any other historian who does.

I'm sincerely interested in learning more. Any authors you would recommend or things I could lookup ?

Not for the math in particular, but if you're generally interested in legitimizing science, which is what rigor does, then I'd suggesting looking at the real classic in the field Leviathan and the Air Pump.

Primary source wise you want Principia Mathematica.

Good point, the nature of what we know is subjective and isn't nearly as rigorous as academic work. I would have been better off stating something like "science is the set of tools for understanding the world" or somesuch.

That's a pretty good definition, and definitions are vitally important. Especially with what I'm getting at here. Science simply should not be understood as something that exists outside of people doing it. That's where a lot of the key epistomological problems in popular scientism come from.

There are wonderful things that I don't consider scientific. Art, love, the act of thinking about something, subjective feelings. Those are wonderful things! They're also not academic, and when studied within academia, I would expect scientific tools to be applied.

And I'm not arguing that science can remove the need for suppositions (value suppositions or orthers).

This obviously isn't something I'm an expert about, however, and I'd love to hear a convincing argument about something in particular (abstract arguments aren't likely to convince me) that should be studied by some means other than science.

I guess I should have been more specific. Disciplines that make truth claims aren't necessarily not bad because they aren't scientific.

Math is the most obvious subject that we don't study scientifically but most people are comfortable with the legitimacy of its truth claims.

It'll be hard to actually give you more answers without digging into your definition of science. I mean you consider my discipline scientific for some reason, so I can't draw on anything from my own work.

 

[Cocaloch]

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