uwot wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2019 11:32 am
Thanks in part to Popper, 'proper scientists' have the theory to dismiss Freud, Jung et al as quacks.
One certainly does not need Popper to understand that all of psychology put over as a science is quackery since Wundt. He began the confusion between psychology, a pseudo-science, and neurology, a true physical science.
uwot wrote:Mon Jul 22, 2019 11:32 am
As for scientists being mostly successes, that is true when they stick to instrumentalism, but frankly, when it comes to positing philosophical models, their record compares with actual philosophers. They also make all sorts of claims which turn out to be wrong. Sometimes this is politically motivated; Lysenkoism being a notorious case, cigarettes don't cause cancer, burning fossil fuels doesn't cause global warming and so on. The point Kuhn made was that science is not some abstract entity that scientists obediently follow. It's done by people who have their own theories and agendas. Which is demonstrably true.
What I referred to specifically was scientists
accomplishments, ("I think it is ironic that philosophers, whose own accomplishments I regard as mostly failures, should be critical of scientists, whose accomplishments are mostly successes.") versus those of philosophers. I wasn't taking about opinions, claims, and hypotheses.
You can call scientific and technological success, "instrumentalism," if you like, but the facts of physical reality discovered by science are not true because they are, "useful," (though they certainly are), but because they correctly describe those facts of reality, which is why they reliable and useful. The nature of the chemical elements as described in the periodic table of the elements is not going to change to make it more useful and the understanding of human anatomy that makes modern medicine possible is not going to change. Of course science will continue to learn more about these and all other things, but that would not be possible if what is already known was not certain.
I am surprised that you have been taken in by the political pseudo-sciences that have put over the greatest scams in history like man-made global warming, and the perpetual scare-mongering of such lies as, 'cigarettes cause cancer.' (Here's a question for those who buy Popper's theory and believe cigarettes cause cancer: what have scientists done to falsify the hypothesis that cigarettes cause cancer?)