The trouble with saying that to many scientists is that they simplistically think that their job is to discover THE TRUTH. Saying that something is wrong because it is dangerous rather than false makes them view you as subjective and therefor intellectually suspect.
Not to mention that scientists are human and what they believe to be the truth is not always the case. E.g. the transphobia of scientists in the atheist movement
So the scientists seek out the social scientists who will take their hard data at face value. They are comfortable with their methods being pulled apart on technical grounds but not on philosophical ones.
I spent 25 years as a biologist and was dismissive of the humanities and philosophy. Only after studying archaeology did my views change. And I have to say that science is piss-easy compared to archaeology, but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily better.
Haha-- this was my answer to everyone who made fun of "Easy A" arts majors--300 people started in my fine arts degree. 15 made it to graduation. Those were EARNED As.
The problem I had with the philosophy of science as a scientist (by which I mostly mean Karl Popper, I gave up reading it after that) is that it is bollox. It simply doesn't reflect how scientists do science.
It does (try Alison Wylie) but it takes commitment to understand it. Most scientists just want to hide in the safety of their data! Reading books *and* doing science is hard.
I don’t know about most scientists any more. But I do know how hard it is to read books *and* do science. I think that’s probably why I don’t do science anymore 😆
Oops. I replied thinking the comment was a direct reply to me. And then posted. And then saw that yours was replying to someone else. I’m not fully used to bluesky mentions yet.
No, science is easier. Because it is data rich you can make a contribution to the heap of human knowledge without having to think too hard. So much data means you can spend a lifetime within its safety.
Yes. Netanyahu cited a paper like this one several years ago on Twitter (I did challenge him, but). Historical rights to land. Our sloppy method kills.
The problem also is that archaeology (and its history/the history of its core concepts) is literally full of these confusions (and this is obviously an euphemism); the closer you look, the more you unfortunately find (as I tried to do here for example: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14582654)
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