Quote:
Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden
To be clear, I am not denying the utility of science, I am asserting that a science needs to be critiqued and challenged by theory. Furthermore, I am implying that science, as well as theory, is incapable of finding an objective truth. Science is ideological, it is this point one should keep in mind when learning about a "discovered truth".
Science is an excellent source of knowledge, but its authority is not absolute.
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Science is is not an authority. It's a process of acquiring knowledge by modelling nature, but it doesn't provide certain knowledge. This lack of certain knowledge is it's primary strength, ensuring these models can adapt and be replaced as better understandings come along. Even the process itself is up for revision, with important distinctions from one field to the next. This can be for ethical reasons (major part of social and medical sciences), or due to the unique subject matter at hand (people and animals are harder to study than rocks, for example. so double blind studies aren't a thing in paleontology, while they are in medicine). The whole point of science is that as something is studied, the ideology of the scientists wont color the results.
Now people can appeal to science, but they are not appealing to the authority of science in that case, but to the results of one or more tests or theories. If they are appealing to an authority, it the authority of the scientist, not science itself.
However, if you say science cannot provide objective truth, then you are asserting that objective truth cannot be had about material things; the whole point of the scientific process is that it reduces to a minimum the influences of human biases and error, thereby providing objective facts. This does not result in perfect objectivity, but, to use math terms, you might say it's limit approaches complete objectivity as the quality of the research increases. Objective knowledge and certain knowledge are very different things.
Of course, the way science is currently practiced has it's flaws, especially medicine and social sciences. Across the board, incentives are currently wrong, encouraging exciting new discoveries over validation (or dis-confirmation) of less exciting but more promising early research. Samples sizes are often too small, data isn't published, p-hacking, and so on are some problems resulting in a rafts of earlier studies and experiments with too small samples being suddenly overturned by later ones with larger samples, better approaches, and so on. Corruption sometimes gets in the way. However, the solutions to all these problems is not abandoning science, but doing it better; indeed, every-time something commonly accepted as scientific is overturned, it's better science doing the overturning.