I think saying that science doesn't arrive at objective truths means defining "objective" to be a word that nobody would ever use.

Give me a number, and I can put that many nines after the decimal place of percent-certianty in my result. For each nine, I have to run my experiment longer. Infinity nines -> complete certainty.

So, in practice, when we're choosing between fact and fiction, what we're really doing is putting our theories into a bucket and letting them duke it out until there's only one voice left telling us how many struts our bridge needs to be built with. The beauty of science is that whatever poetry, rousing manifesto, or brilliant connections you want to pit it against, you can always look at them and order up exactly as many nines as it takes to beat them. The certainty of science is finite, but unbounded: so it's the best we've got.

>Theories might even be inconsistent with other theories [...]

There's a nice philosophy-of-science trick you can do if you want QM and GR at the same time. Just look at the error bars on the experiments that support the two theories, and propagate them down into error bars on the theories themselves. That leads to theories being statements of knowledge over appropriate ranges (and to appropriate precisions), making them "true" in an absolute sense. (If you do this with Newton's classical mechanics, you will realize that QM was not an overturning but an allowed-for refinement.)

I think the person who you are responding to took objection at a philosophical level, namely, it's simply not the case, however robust the scientific results, that you have direct access to the 'pure nature of the world in itself'. That is a conceit of the correspondence theory of truth that hasn't been thought credible since the linguistic turn. There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world, and that language is rooted in and conditioned by history. Hence Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Of course, that doesn't practically undermine the value of scientific investigation.

>There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world

This is debatable[0]. Presumably, people without language can still think, and even if you believe that they invent an internal language to think with you are placing language into a tool-role, where it can be created and destroyed in service of a higher goal (thought). However, that still leaves the problems with correspondence unexplained: but hopefully I can convince you that they are not too bad.

I'll sketch it for you:

Coordinate systems are all equally good by the measure of how well their predictions work. They're obviously constructions - but that doesn't itself imply that the models that use them are constructions, any more than the wrappers burgers come in makes their meat paper. (I mean, the models might be constructions too, but it's not the use of arbitrary coordinate systems that makes them so.)

Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way."

So, one step above algebra and two steps above specific calculations, there's the concepts. From a scientific perspective unless you think the brain is supernatural it's really to be expected that ideas are no more than symbols. BUT: for the same reasons as the two cases above, it has yet to be shown that the concepts are not themselves dancing around a still higher truth, each (effectively true) idea differing only in the baggage of being human; that silly but fun phrase referring to how we like symbols but are presumably using them to mean something.

[0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ObjLOT

>This is debatable[0]. Presumably, people without language can still think, and even if you believe that they invent an internal language to think with you are placing language into a tool-role, where it can be created and destroyed in service of a higher goal (thought).

That's a moot point, I think, as it can be argued easily that thought is a language itself, or requires one (whether it's a human language like english, or a language of symbols, or some other form of structured description of events and thoughts, even the structure just happens at the chemical level in the brain).

>Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way."

It's obvious in these examples -- which, coincidentally are all from math (trigonometry, coordinate systems), that is the quintessential non-empirical/reality-based domain. It's easy to find isomorphisms like that in math, since that's inherent in their core purpose.

It's not obvious (or true) for the general case, talking about the outside world.

I'm not entirely sure that I understand what your argument is, but I think you're saying that different concepts represent the same ideas. I don't think concepts are distinct from ideas, so I'm not convinced by that. When the Greeks used the concept of democracy they were not accessing an ethereal plane outside of themselves. They just invented the concept and social practice in the context of their own historical reality. This is simply not the same concept as that used in the French Revolution, although there are important historical connections between the two. I don't know how you would go about arguing that, despite the fact that these are different concepts, they are somehow, unbeknown to themselves, referring to some idea that stands outside of space and time.

I do think that there's a mind-independent world that gives us basic referents to represent. But the world is not cut at the joints (it doesn't come self-divided into identifiable objects) and is not self-interpreting (it does not represent itself to us). Thales, the first philosopher, certainly had a concept of water - he thought that everything in the universe was made of water. But despite the fact that the referent is the same, his concept of water is markedly different from our own. There is not an unmediated correspondence between the concept and the referent; hence the historical variability and contingency.

It's nice to see Kuhn get a shout out; just occasionally I wish that the HN community at large was as well-informed on philosophy (and history) of science as we apparently are on all manner of technical topics. In fact one of the things that annoyed me about the original article was its complete lack of acknowledgment* that there are, you know, actual philosophers of science who might have thought about this issue before.

As an aside, I do think it's worth mentioning that the propositions:

> it's simply not the case, however robust the scientific results, that you have direct access to the 'pure nature of the world in itself'.

and

> There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world

are really completely separate. I heartily disagree with the second (Wittgenstein?), and heartily agree with the first (any philosopher who's not a naive realist?) :)

---

* Martin Rees is a well informed guy, and I'm sure he knows what philosophy of science is and has maybe even read some of it, but apparently he didn't choose to mention it. Sure, maybe that would be getting a bit too heavy for The Atlantic, but still... grrrrr...

They are separate in the sense that one can believe the first and not the second, as you do, but not in the sense that they have no connection. The second is, albeit crudely put here, a common starting point for reaching the first.

And yes, I think Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is the most profound book that I have ever read. My view of the world was transformed upon reading it, though it took a couple of years to properly digest.

I agree that a lot of the tech community is neither well read in philosophy (or the humanities in general for that matter), nor believes that they should be. Sometimes that creates wonderfully naive attempts to think of philosophy as one would code, but in general, it leads to a really one-dimensional view of the social world.

It's true. But I do get the sense that at least the Hacker News community is more curious about and open to philosophy and the humanities than the tech world on average, and certainly more so than other online tech communities that I enjoy not reading (Slashdot, Reddit, etc.). Of course there is the usual subset of people who think all work in the humanities is either gibberish or part of some sort of monolithic vast Stalinist-identity-politics conspiracy, and a much larger number of well-meaning but naive people who seem to think they can resolve big social, historical, and economic questions much as they would debug a piece of Javascript. But time and again I'm genuinely surprised by the kinds of things that make it to the front page, and by how the comments often go deeper than the original article. There was even a sub-thread on this thread where people were bringing up Foucault's The Order of Things. Not bad for comments on a piece of naive pop-philosophy.

I'd say it's more accurate to say that science doesn't arrive at objective truths so much as shared truths. It arrives at truths that as many scientists as possible can agree upon. Consensus, after all, is the highest state a scientific theory can aspire to.

Consensus has nothing to do with science, which can be done by a sole individual completely separate from society. You can follow the scientific method just fine and discover new phenomena and nobody might believe you, but you still did science.

Getting consensus involved in the philosophy of science is usually done as a direct assault on the idealst's question of, "what if this is all just your elaborate hallucination?"

When I'm asked that I just say, "begone, dream-foulers." Then all of the idealists in the universe disppear.