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RE: Does Science Need To Be True?

in #philosophy8 years ago (edited)

I think science that is proven to be untrue(falsified) can be called "failed theory" or "no longer science." Phlogiston theory failed, and was removed from the corpus of science. This doesn't mean that all science is correct, it means that human brains are very limited on a scale of "absolute possible intelligence," and that the theories that perform the best (produce the most replicable results) provide an optimal way of thinking about reality. Of course, this is goal-related. If your goal is to feed millions of people, you'd best put capitalist scientists and agricultural engineers in charge, not priests and communists.

The priests and communists don't benefit from totally open discourse, the scientists and capitalists, do.

It's always a matter of degree to which one is correct, not a binary "correct or not." Even totally wrong, disproven theories have a small amount of "value/correctness/utility" because the person who holds them can be said to have considered the problem, believing it important to obtain knowledge in that domain (even if the knowledge they obtained was inadequate, or outright false, or was unfalsifiable).

The holding of facts that have small utility is better than the holding of facts that have no utility or negative utility, given the holder's willingness to discover the utility of their perceived facts, and "update/'further investigate' when necessary."

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