> What is "it", if not truth?

There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.

Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.

Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.

Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.

▲

psychoslave 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.

Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?

https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...

What about Albert Einstein?

https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...

Or Richard Feynman?

https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...

Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.

▲

postmodern100 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)

> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.

This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:

"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."

▲

inetknght 5 days ago | parent [-]

> can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color

Your rephrase is incorrect.

"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.

Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.

▲

postmodern100 5 days ago | parent [-]

My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.

Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.

▲

inetknght 5 days ago | parent [-]

> my brain interprets

> someone else's brain

Yes, like I said: it depends on context.

Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.

Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.

	▲	postmodern100 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲

card_zero 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction.