Kant vs Israel

Submitted by Morry Markovitz (United States), Aug 22, 2010 at 23:33

As a scientist I would ask you WHY scientists are concerned with facts? (I do this because scientists ask WHY If they are concerned with facts and NOT truth, then why don't they just collect sports statisitics and a lot of rocks and molecules and locations of stars and write them down and go home to sleep? I would suggest if you believe what you say, you are a very unnatrual scientist.

Science seeks understanding of the universe and understanding requires knowledge. Facts provide concrete instances of knowledge, and if you know a fact about the world around you, then you know a truth about the world around you. Truth includes knowledge about FACTS. It also includes knowledge about relatinships, ie natural laws of the universe, what is the causality of various phenomena we observe? What are the causal connections amongst observed facts? Hypotheses and theories are not facts. They are attempts to describe the causal relationships amongst facts, nd they are what science is trying to accomplish, they are the essence of science's intent.

An idea which corresponds to the facts of the world is said to be true. Science is concerned with knowledge and understanding of the facts of the world and their causal connections with each other.

Maybe you just made a spelling error and confused "scientist" with "statistician." Statisticians gather facts. Scientists seek to explain them in terms of other facts. All knowledge is contextual and explanations themselves often need to be explained from still deeper level. But the more levels to which we undrestand the relationships, the more scientific knowledge we have acquired. Scientists seek to acquire knowledge about the universe, the various entities which occupy it, and the way they interact with other entities. Then they attempt to decipher the reliable order in such behaviors.

Since the very existence of everything that exists is a fact of the unverse, of course science is concerned with facts. This is an almost content-less statement. People who bet on sports gmes are concerned with facts. Pilots and architects and tax collectors are concerned with facts. This is no more relevant to their occupation than it is for scientists. All of these occupations are concerned with facts for different reasons. It is the reaason for the concern with facts that defines what these occupations are and what distniguishes them from each other.

Science seeks to udnerstand the basic relationships governing the entities which occupy our universe. It must first identify the entities. That is fact gathering. The goal is not to enforce the tax laws or make a nice landing at an airport. The goal is to achieve a CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of the principles or "natural laws" which determine the behavior of the entities existing in the universe. What use that understanding is ultimately put to, is the job of other professions, such as engineering, which coincidentally is also concerned with facts, as is every conceptual consciousness.

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