Is Science the Only Means of Knowing?

[Resha Caner]

As always, it helps if a response accompanies your vote.

 

[SkyWriting]

As always, it helps if a response accompanies your vote.

As I've mentioned, scientific "answers" are place-holders for
information that is by definition to be replaced by new answers later.

So anything you "know" in science is temporary knowledge.

Knowing God Through Answered Prayer - Steps 1,2,&3

 

[Halbhh]

As always, it helps if a response accompanies your vote.

I like this question.

Scientific effort is a great way to learn more about nature.

It's not the only way to learn more, for individuals, even for nature!

Even for just everyday mechanics, physics, most people learn a fair amount by unconscious experience. Automatically. The brain is set up for this automatic learning.

 

[Chesterton]

But knowing what though? I know my shirt is red, but I failed every science class I ever had.

 

[Carl Emerson]

But knowing what though? I know my shirt is red, but I failed every science class I ever had.

Science has yet to solve colour blindness...

 

[Halbhh]

But knowing what though? I know my shirt is red, but I failed every science class I ever had.

Well, you know what happens if you don't hold carefully onto a glass of water, if you hold it too loosely, by experience. You learned automatically, without need of a scientific effort.

( or a mix! -- I think I remember actually experimenting on this one: barely holding on to the glass of water with less and less force, and trying to learn by experiment how little force was enough to prevent slipping, and that's a science type effort actually. I ended up dropping a glass or 2 of water, and then I continued later with an empty glass and a soft surface for it to fall on)

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

As always, it helps if a response accompanies your vote.

Who said that man's way, man's wisdom, man's knowledge, (even the best of mankind) ,

is for believers a way of knowing anything ?

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

Science has yet to solve colour blindness...

...... "turn off all the lights" ...... puts everyone on equal footing ?

 

[Halbhh]

As always, it helps if a response accompanies your vote.

Instead of narrowing your question as we could, I love it because it's a broad question, and opens up widely.

Some ways of knowing stuff -- including ordinary things like how to brush your teeth or what music style you enjoy.

Some various ways to learn or know ordinary everyday things that mostly are not crucial things:

Intuition.
Epiphany.
Practice -- motor nerve training by repetition of physical actions.
Learning by instruction.
Learning by watching.
Learning by trial and error and continuing adjustments. (scientific effort is a variety of this one).
Learning by hearing the sounds of how someone is talking about something -- heard emotion.
Learning by unconscious processing during sleep of what you experienced during a day.

 

[Silmarien]

I see science as primarily a very long and drawn-out empirical exploration of the idea that the universe is intelligible and that human mental categories actually do correspond to reality. I don't really believe that it's a means of "knowing" in any meaningful way, though, since these underlying ideas will never be completely certain, and without them, there is no knowledge about the external world at all.

 

[MrsFoundit]

Science cannot even explore most of what we need to know.

 

[Tolworth John]

Science measures and records what can be seen, wieghed, tested and repeated.
It cannot measure my happiness, or sadness yet I know when I am happy, sad etc.
Similarly it cannot know about spiritual things, most scientist do not recognise that there is a spiritual world as they are convinced the material is all there is.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

I would say there are plenty of ways of knowing things. I don't need "science" to tell me my age (unless very basic mathematics is counted as science?) I don't need science to tell me that a T-shirt is red, or that two plus two is four.
Perhaps it might be more helpful to ask "Is science the most reliable method of testing if something is true"? In which case, the answer would be "Yes".
@Resha Caner , may I ask why you posed this question?

 

[MrsFoundit]

Perhaps it might be more helpful to ask "Is science the most reliable method of testing if something is true"? In which case, the answer would be "Yes".

So if you do not need science to tell you a t shirt is red, do you still need it tell you it is "true" that your t shirt is red?

 

[InterestedAtheist]

So if you do not need science to tell you a t shirt is red, do you still need it tell you it is "true" that your t shirt is red?

Science has certainly benefitted us by showing us how we were mistaken about many things we thought were true, including many things that religion taught us.

 

[MrsFoundit]

Science has certainly benefitted us by showing us how we were mistaken about many things we thought were true, including many things that religion taught us.

This does not answer the question.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

This does not answer the question.

Then I'm afraid I don't understand what you are asking. Perhaps you could rephrase it?

 

[Tom 1]

Who said that man's way, man's wisdom, man's knowledge, (even the best of mankind) ,

is for believers a way of knowing anything ?

I know how to make a sandwich, that’s fairly handy.

 

[Resha Caner]

@Resha Caner , may I ask why you posed this question?

You can read the conversation that prompted it here.

Perhaps it might be more helpful to ask "Is science the most reliable method of testing if something is true"? In which case, the answer would be "Yes".

Hmm. IMO this comes close to hair splitting - a simple rephrasing so the question can be answered as yes. If I told you I wore a red shirt last month, rather than believe me, would it be more reliable to initiate a scientific study regarding shirts I wore last month?

Maybe it's just a difference in our philosophy of science. I'm very Popperian in my view of science (as are most who practice science … or is it more accurate to say, most of those I know who practice science), and so "truth" is simply not a concept I work with in my engineering endeavors. Rather, for what I am studying I work in terms of levels of confidence and falsification of hypotheses.

 

[Resha Caner]

Then I'm afraid I don't understand what you are asking. Perhaps you could rephrase it?

I thought it was clear what was asked. You said you don't need science to know your t-shirt is red. But you also said science is the most reliable method for knowing what is true. So when you believe your t-shirt is red sans science, do you know that belief is true?

If a simple observation that your t-shirt is red is less reliable than scientifically testing your t-shirt for color, then can you really say you "know" it's red, or do you only believe it's red? This is the issue I spoke of in my previous post that, to me, seems like silly hair-splitting.