and amazingly the amount of information that comes out with peer reviewed science that has been repeatable enough to be accepted as fact and advertised as such can be thrown away 15 years later as wrong... how can a fact be wrong? Either it was a fact back then and you were right or you were wrong back then and it wasn't a fact but information supporting a non-factual hypothesis... given how often we see this presented on news programs, newspapers and touted as fact only to have it revoked years later leads us all to question how much we really know about these "facts".
Case in point: Sugar is great, sugar is bad, fat is great, fat is bad, red wine is bad, red wine is good... blah blah blah.
A fact is a fact, indisputable. Yet many of the facts when chased back to first principles seem to have enough ambiguity to beg questions over just how much we really know and how much we just think we know. I have whole days where I question everything I think I know and am still no wiser at the end of the day.
A scientific fact is "a repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experimentation or other means), also called empirical evidence" [2].
The media and general public doesn't really understand the distinction, and tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in the reality is the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.
Unfortunately, there are also a ton of perverse incentives such as when the sugar industry pays to fund science that 'proves' fat is the cause of problems[3], not sugar.
This doesn't mean science can't be trusted. Even flawed scientific theories can still be useful: for example, school children learn how to do basic quantum physics using the Bohr-Rutherford model before learning that model is actually disproven, because the model is still adequate to explain what's necessary at that level of education.
You have to judge the source of the study, who funded it (and why), and if it has been reproduced enough to be widely accepted -- especially in cases where there are contradictory results or theories.
> The media and general public [...] tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in reality the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.
That Popperian view (published 1934) is itself somewhat problematic, and I'd say obsolete. The distinction between pure unambiguous observation statements and the edifice of theory on top (concepts, operationalisation, hypothesis, test, theory, etc.), stemming from Positivism even before Popper, is also problematic. Even the distinction between analytic (logical, "by definition") and synthetic (empirical, "by observation") statements is problematic, see Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951). Newer approaches see scientific theories as a "web of beliefs" - basically, "empirical facts" and "theory" and "auxiliary theories" are all intertwined.
The question, then, whether science can give us real facts about the real world (beyond what's immediately observable) is subject of an ongoing debate between instrumentalism and scientific realism.
Personally, I come down on the realist side - I think there are electrons and there were dinosaurs, even if I haven't seen them.
And thus, I think it's legitimate to call very well established scientific theories "facts"
(also, btw, because of the "oh, but it's just a theory" response of various anti-science trolls (not you, mind you!)).
Your definition of fact is dangerous to science. As soon as something is declared "fact" (is this done by some sort of high science cleric handing down edicts in an ivory tower or something) it can never be contradicted. All progress in that area will effectively halt, since the assumption is that there is no more progress to be made. I for one thank God we haven't regarded fact in this way, otherwise we may not have General Relativity (among countless other contradictory scientific findings).
> No. They are accepted as a scientific theory [1].
Thanks for clarifying that... indeed, I agree with that adjustment.
The problem you highlight is that most people aren't exposed to anything but "this is fact" spewed by the media and don't have the benefit of time or contradictory evidence at hand to decide what is true and what isn't... so even with the ability to think critically, they're bombarded with so many alternative-facts that eventually they begin to believe it too.
I think this is why science education is so important, even for people not going into hard science. Really the two main takeaways should be understanding the difference between empirical evidence and scientific theory, and that theories can never be proven 'true', but they can be proven false, and until then they're really only considered 'not yet false'.
Using their critical thinking skills they can then apply this knowledge to non-scientific situations, so when a politician say something is a "fact" they can figure out if it's a "fact" like empirical evidence, or they just mean it's a theory they believe in.
Through this lens, "alternative fact" must mean either "alternative theory" -- which is fine, and can be tested against another theory by figuring out a way to prove one false -- or "alternative empirical evidence" -- which is not possible, and therefore is just a fancy way of saying 'lie'.
Because the reality is humans don't really "know" anything the absolute certainty, but there are still ways of assessing which beliefs are more likely to be true than others.
There is always the possibility the findings of a peer reviewed, journal published, replicated study are wrong. They are just more likely to be correct than assertions without such support.
This is fundamental to science though. Nothing is ever proven to be true. Scientific facts are contingent and corrigible. Science is just more rigorous than our other methods of establishing facts about reality.
Scientists will absolutely tell you what they believe to be true based on the available evidence and we colloquially call those facts. So it's both true of science as an abstraction and working science.
Fact: a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true.
So... are you saying that a fact isn't something that's known to be true? Because my understanding of the word "fact" is that it means something indisputable, an underlying truth upon which you can base other truths and know them all to be true. If this is the case, then what can we possibly know with any sense of conviction?
Yes, correct. Humans are not capable of having access to indisputable truth. However, indisputable truth is not necessary for forming useful foundations for other knowledge. Humans exist in the space of the "probably good enough."
What becomes a fact for you depends on how tolerant you are for uncertainty. You're probably going to die. That's almost 100%. A solipsistic universe is likewise very unlikely. Those are pretty good bases for facts, but they're not indisputable.
Facts are not a simple structure. They are a conclusion of a series of comparisons after which we have considered many things and at the end decided that the evidence satisfies our threshold for uncertainty. People regularly make assumptions on which facts are predicated, and so we can say that we only have access to contingent facts, because they will always lead back to some assumption sooner or later.
If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
> If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
It's true, of course, in a sense, but a great book to get some perspective on the development and "historicity" of mathematical fact is Imre Lakatosh's great Proofs and Refutations.
It's a great read, as a fictional dialogue of students and teacher on Euler's "simple" formula
V - E + F = 2
about the numbers of vertices (corners), edges and faces. They go and prove it, and oops, someone comes up with a counterexample, and they realise they have to refine things. Very instructive book.
True, but Hilbert was a mathematician and was expressing the general thought, that mathematics could be formalized and when that was done, it would be complete, consistent, firm, round, and fully-packed. When that was demonstrated to be false, it had no great effect on day-to-day mathematics.
Right, there are game-changing advances in mathematical logic and sea changes in mathematical philosophy. The discovery of non-euclidean geometry did not mean euclidean geometry was false, and real analysis is the same whether you found it on sets or categories, by definition. Incompleteness doesn't eliminate the possibility of consistency. Mathematics changes by becoming more expressive and growing outwards and inwards.
Sometimes, a theorem is proven to be inconsistent and thrown out. My point was this happens a lot less often with mathematical theorems than it does with scientific facts because facts are based on our inductive study of the universe, whereas mathematics only makes statements about syllogisms. Unlike the real world, math is an area of study where incontrovertible facts are at least possible, because we make everything up, and just have to make sure we're consistent about it. We do not have access to such a priori knowledge about reality.
Dictionaries are not sources of objective facts either. The subject you're looking to know more about is the philosophy of science and in particular how it relates to epistemology which tackles this subject.
These days I wonder if anything is a source of objective fact. The more I try and remain objective and strive for enlightenment, the cloudier everything seems to become.
Objective facts are so few and far between and based on assumptions that are either vague in their definitions, limited or flawed that chasing them appears to enforce keeping an open mind. These two paradigms appear to be intrinsically linked.
Probably because in all of your examples the science generally didn't say that - the news did. Nuance is lost when things get summarized, especially by people rewarded for viewership/ads and not accuracy.
I have a background in Nuclear Physics. One of the major themes was that Physicists recognize that they are humans, and that they make human mistakes. The take active steps to double-check their assumptions. To have independent third parties check their work, so that bias is avoided.
Except for Climate Change Denialism, those problems predate empiricism as a thing noticeable enough to have coherent opposition, by (at least) hundreds of generations. They aren't produced by anti-empiricism (though, insofar as empiricism threatens them, they may be a source of resistance to empiricism.)
That's the flavor of the decade, yes, but back in the 70s there was "zero population denialism" which is roughly equivalent (there was a big scare that the earth's population was unsustainable and we were rapidly running out of resources and couples needed to stop having more than 2 babies and if you disagreed you were a zero population denier)
Well, sure, climate change denialism is also a manifestation of something older than empiricism and not a product of anti-empiricism, but that's a more involved argument and the other examples were clearer and simpler.
