Misunderstanding Empiricism

I don't disagree with anything you say, although I would just note the following: MMR and Autism Yes, I quite agree, if what you're concerned with is the scientific question of whether there is a relationship. But for most people, it is the personal question of whether they should allow their child to take the MMR jab that is important.The first question doesn't require a definitive conclusion. To reach a scientific consensus, it is only necessary that we exclude reasonable doubt. There's also no time constraint on our investigation - if it takes 10 years to reach a consensus, then it takes 10 years.The second question requires a decision: either my child has the jab, or she doesn't. And I need to make the decision by the middle of next month.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I'd love to engage in a debate about this, Brad, but I don't understand a word this time. Apart from 'Gladyshev', and I've given my opinion about him before .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I already addressed just such a situation in the very message you replied to when I mentioned that I had told LindaLou several times that when all you have is anecdotal data, then that's what you go with.But the dilemma you describe does not exist because there is already a scientific consensus on this matter, and there has been for a while now. The threat of autism or anything else was never real, as additional studies motivated by concerns from the public make clear.What the scientific evidence also tells you, unequivocally, is that the probability of death, not to mention lesser problems, from such diseases is by no means zero, not even for something as innocuous seeming as measles, and is certainly greater than the threat of the vaccine itself. Plus there's a public safety issue.But the important point was that there was never any misunderstanding of empiricism. Any observation of the real world is empirical. It's just that not all observations possess the scientific qualities of precision, rigour and repeatability.--Percy

So Percy and I have slight a difference of opinion.I personally don't trust my personal experience at all unless it can be verified by at least another person. While I haven't experienced any hallucination yet, I have heard plenty of cases (my aunt works in an insane institution).Percy thinks that there are other trustworthy approaches to attaining accurate knowledge of the world. I personally can't think of any, but the important thing is we both agree that the scientific method seems to be the best approach to any kind of natural phenomenon.Again, what's your point?

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

I wouldn't consider JavaMan's brief quote to be an accurate description of my opinion. If it could be summed up so briefly I wouldn't have posted a multi-paragraph response to him. One of the things I said was that if the question is whether the light is red and should you stop, then personal observation is just fine, especially since a more rigorous scientific approach involving quantitative measurement and replication is neither practical nor necessary. I then added that the question of whether vaccines and autism are related is much more subtle and is a case where a scientific approach is more suitable and even essential.The simple point is that there are certain questions that are appropriate for scientific investigation, and without doubt the relationship between vaccines and autism is one of them. There's no attempt to portray personal observation as worthless. The point is that if on the one hand you have a collection of personal observations, what we usually call anecdotes, and on the other you have scientific studies, then scientific studies win out because they are far more reliable, rigorous, precise, accurate, etc. The scientific method is the best way we have, by far, for giving ourselves confidence about what we know of the real world.Why this point isn't clear to PD and LL and JM and NJ and others is beyond me, but the prevalence of people of such an inclination makes it clear why it is so difficult to convince anyone concerning issues like creation/evolution, 911 conspiracies, UFOs, ESP, faith healing and all the rest.--Percy

Only if you're choosing not to listen to those around you. Why would you be limited to only the things you yourself specifically experienced? Oh. So when you said "only your personal experience", you didn't actually mean only your personal experience, you meant your personal experience plus information about the scientific consensus. Which is exactly what I've been fucking talking about this whole time.If this whole thread is simply going to be based on saying the exact opposite of what you mean, Java, why didn't you say so in the beginning?And I'm wondering, too, why the evidence of the unreliability of your own personal experiences isn't a part of your consideration. You seem to have completely ignored that.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Why are you getting so upset? We're only having a debate .My aim in this thread is to point out that the power of empricism derives from its insistence that our knowledge of the world is provisional, not from a particular approach to acquiring knowledge.At this rate, it's obviously going to take me a long time to make my point. But, hey, the journey is half the fun .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Hmm. That's a sneaky trick, don't you think? Rather than depending on your responses to my arguments, you're using the rhetorical trick of associating me with irrational beliefs.That's something I'd expect in politics, but not in a rational debate.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

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The scientific method is the best way we have, by far, for giving ourselves confidence about what we know of the real world.

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Why this point isn't clear to PD and LL and JM and NJ and others is beyond me, but the prevalence of people of such an inclination makes it clear why it is so difficult to convince anyone concerning issues like creation/evolution, 911 conspiracies, UFOs, ESP, faith healing and all the rest.

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Wow, I made the illogical list just because I'm trying to show you that the average person is at the mercy of battling experts.I do understand, but I also understand the way society works.If we could see the experiment or study first hand, there would be no problem, but we don't usually have that option. The average person is at the mercy of the interpretations of others. (experts, authority, etc.)BTW, I already agreed concerning autism (117). So please give credit where credit is due.I've lived long enough to know that experts can be right within the limits of the information available to them. I also know that scientists can be wrong, peers can be wrong, doctors can be wrong. Experts can be wrong. I also know that some discoveries that change the way we do things today were not considered viable by their peers.The average person gets mixed signals. I have an illustration in mind, but no time to type it right now.

JavaMan, you're more likely to get an answer by posting responses to what I say instead of with ad hominem.You weren't associated with irrational beliefs. You were included with a group of people who do not distinguish between anecdotal and scientific evidence.--Percy

I was assuming that, by using the term in a discussion about empiricism, everyone would understand what I was talking about. Clearly not .Empiricism means there's no magical bullet train to truth. When I make a judgement in the world, I'm working under uncertainty. I can't just take the scientific consensus and treat that as holy writ, because, at bottom, it's just as possible for a scientific consensus to be in error as any other claim about knowledge.And the reason I'm stressing "personal experience" here isn't because I think personal experience has any special access to the truth, but because I'm focusing on that aspect of empiricism that stresses uncertainty, i.e. the notion that our knowledge is limited because our only route to it is through personal experience - there is nothing, not even scientific consensus, that can magically deliver certainty to us.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Two responses to this.First, you did not make the illogical list. You were included in a list of people who do not distinguish between anecdotal and scientific evidence.Second, the problem is not that the average person is at the mercy of battling experts. The problem is that the average person can't tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan, or between a scientific consensus and fringe views. For example, the experts say that vaccines are safe, and they have the evidence to support that view. The charlatans say vaccines are not safe, and all they have is websites and misrepresentations. Even better would be to understand how reality works, because it has a big impact on what you say next: If you're only going to trust knowledge gained at close hand, then there will be exceedingly little knowledge that you ever trust. That's reality. So if you want to know more than just a smidgen you're going to have to trust experts, which is just what scientists do outside their own specialty. Again, that's reality. You keep making this point, and the answer isn't going to change. No one's claiming science and scientists don't make mistakes. But the point you're either ignoring or just not getting is that science is still the best method we have for figuring out the way the world works. Whatever its faults and problems might be, it is still far superior to anything else.You say for perhaps the umpteenth time, "Experts can be wrong," but I don't know why you keep repeating this, because the response has never been, "No, experts cannot be wrong." The response has always been, "However wrong experts might be, anyone else is likely to be wronger."You say you want transparency and control, i.e., you want to know how knowledge was gained and you want to understand it, and you want the right to make decisions about your children and yourself regarding all matters of health, but consider that if you were living back in the 1920's and the board of health slapped a quarantine notice on your front door, if you left the house you could be arrested. How's that for loss of control!Ignorance of the history of epidemics is causing you to advocate in favor of a system of voluntary compliance that will return us to the time of epidemics, and indeed we're already seeing evidence of this. You have to vaccinate your children before enrolling them in the public schools not so much to protect just your children, but to protect all children in our society, because only a general program of vaccination can provide the level of immunity in a population that makes it impossible for diseases to gain a foothold. You live in a society, and society has the right to protect itself from dangers. Your family is not a group of hermits in a cave, so you have to live by the rules of society. But the era of epidemics is so far in the past and modern vaccines have been so successful that people no longer remember or understand the very real dangers that these diseases represent. Okay, so let's say you're an average person getting mixed signals. The answer is to listen to the experts. The real experts, not the self-appointed ones with their own websites or who publish in their own journals.--Percy

I'm sorry, I obviously didn't make it clear that I was using MMR and autism as an illustration. I'm not interested in arguing about MMR/autism in particular (FYI, I made the decision to take my daughters for their MMR jabs).What I was trying to illustrate was the difference between investigating a scientific problem and coming to a personal decision. Let me use a different illustration instead. (This one is more to my point because it provides an example of a scientific consensus being wrong ).In the 90s we had a BSE epidemic here in the UK, and there was a lot of concern about whether it was safe to eat beef from infected cattle. The scientific consensus for many years was that it was perfectly safe, because there was no way for the disease vector to transfer from cattle to humans. We even had the amusing sight of a government minister force-feeding his daughter a hamburger to drive the point home.Unfortunately, it turned out that it was possible for the disease vector to spread to humans. By the end of the 90s it was shown that many people had contracted variant CJD by eating meat from infected cattle.Now, I don't blame anyone for this. The scientifc consensus was right to be conservative - known disease vectors like bacteria and viruses couldn't possibly transfer to humans under these circumstances. Unfortunately, BSE and vCJD are caused by a disease vector that wasn't properly understood when the BSE epidemic arose.Now one of the interesting things about this case was that there was anecdotal evidence doing the rounds (I don't know whether it was ever confirmed scientifically), that the BSE epidemic itself was caused by cattle being fed the remains of sheep infected with Scrapie (another prion disease). And many people, using analogical reasoning on top of this anecdotal evidence, said to themselves: 'If the disease can spread from sheep to cattle, then maybe it can spread from cattle to humans. I'll give up beef for the time being, just in case.'As I've said to Taz and Crashfrog, my point in opening this thread was to show that the power of empiricism doesn't lie in its providing a special methodology for arriving at the truth, but in its emphasis on the provisional nature of our knowledge.No model of reality can ever be complete. There is always the possibility that some condition we haven't taken into account will require us to overhaul our model. And, in my view, it's the willingness to accept this suspended state of uncertainty that explains the scientific and technological advances that we have seen over the last couple of hundred years.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I'm asking you to treat your personal experience in the same way. It's obvious that you don't, though, but it's known that personal, anecdotal experience is even less "holy writ" than the scientific consensus.But for some reason, the same calculation of uncertainty doesn't enter in to it when the anecdotes are happening to you. Why is that?

I don't quite understand where you've got that impression from. I'm well aware of the limitations of my personal experience. Isn't that what I've been saying .I'm focusing on scientific consensus just because that's the contentious point. But of course I lay greater stress on what the scientific consensus is, than on, say, what happened to my dog's hairdresser's sister last Thursday in Marbella.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang