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+--- Thread: Scientific evidence's dependence upon persuasion + Philosophy by another name (/thread-5265.html)
Scientific evidence's dependence upon persuasion + Philosophy by another name - C C - Apr 29, 2018
https://theconversation.com/what-might-appear-to-be-common-sense-is-not-always-based-on-scientific-evidence-95228
EXCERPT: . . . As recent climate change scepticism shows, the fortunes of scientific evidence can be swayed by something as fleeting as a tweet.
[...] History reveals that scientific forms of evidence have rarely, if ever, been detached from rhetoric. In fact, the very idea of evidence has its origins within the context of classical rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Our modern term originates from the ancient Greek ἐνάργεια (enargeia), a rhetorical device whereby words were used to enhance the truth of a speech through constructing a vivid and evocative image of the things related. Far from independent and objective, enargeia depended entirely on the abilities of the orator.
[...] We can be forgiven for forgetting that the idea of scientific evidence originates in the art of rhetoric, for early modern scientists went to considerable lengths to disassociate the idea from its classical past. Through their efforts, the meaning of evidence was shifted from a rhetorical device to denote something sufficiently self-evident that inferences could be drawn from it. Unlike classical evidentia, scientific “evidence” was objective because it spoke for itself. As the motto of the newly-minted Royal Society of London - nullius in verba - stressed, its members were to “take no one’s word for it”. Just like forensic evidentia, the truth of scientific evidence was based on its immediacy.
[But] Contrary to the Royal Society’s motto, it was not the things themselves but the way in which they were presented – and their presentation by a morally upstanding expert – that ultimately did most of the convincing. The same holds true today. The invisible structures, processes and interactions that scientists train for years to observe remain unobservable to most people.
Even when evident to scientists, this does not make climate change evidence evident to the average person....
MORE: https://theconversation.com/what-might-appear-to-be-common-sense-is-not-always-based-on-scientific-evidence-95228
Philosophy by Another Name (Part-1)
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/philosophy-by-another-name/
EXCERPT: Every professional philosopher, or student of philosophy, knows how linguistically confusing the name of our discipline can be when talking to people outside the field. They immediately assume you are in the business of offering sage advice, usually in the form of unargued aphorisms and proverbs. You struggle to explain that you don’t do that kind of philosophy, at which point you may well be accused of abandoning your historical calling — unearthing and explicating the “meaning of life” and what the ultimate human goods are. You may then be castigated for not being a “real philosopher,” by contrast with assorted gurus, preachers, homeopaths and twinkly barroom advice givers. Our subject then falls into disrepute and incomprehension.
These accusers have a point: What we do is not accurately described by the word we choose to categorize ourselves. So what is a philosopher to do? I have a bold proposal: Let us drop the name “philosophy” for the discipline so called and replace it with a new one. The present name is obsolete, misleading and harmful — long past its expiration date.[...] I have toyed with many new names, but the one that I think works best is “ontics.” It is sufficiently novel as not to be confused with other fields; it is pithy and can easily be converted to “onticist” and “ontical”; it echoes “physics,” and it emphasizes that our primary concern is the general nature of being.
Renaming Philosophy (Part-2)
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/name-calling-philosophy-as-ontical-science/
EXCERPT: My conception of philosophy is broadly Aristotelian: the subject consists of the search for the essences of things by means of a priori methods. [...] I suggested in my earlier essay that philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons). I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics and chemistry; rather, it is an a priori science, like the “formal science” of mathematics. So it is quite beside the point to insist that philosophical claims are not testable by means of empirical experiments: neither is pure mathematics, though it is a science nonetheless. Anyone remotely acquainted with contemporary symbolic logic, philosophy of logic, analytical metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and even modern theories of justice, will appreciate the motivation for according such philosophy the status of a science. [...] It is no part of my position that philosophy should be limited to purely theoretical matters, divorced from questions of value and how to live — though a large part of it is thus theoretical. There is plenty of room here for ethics, philosophy of art, value theory, and even “practical wisdom.” In my terminology, we might label these parts of philosophy “axiological ontics”— that is, the study of the nature and being of value in all its forms.
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