(March 22, 2022 at 7:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(March 22, 2022 at 7:11 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: So whence lies the dividing line in science between objectivity and bias?
I say a more honest statement would be, "Science strives to be objective. And has made significant progress in doing so. Some biases still plague science and make it less objective than it could be. But still, it's remarkably objective."
The human mind is inherently limited, with built-in biases. Many of these are not like homophobia, which can be educated away. This is more like the inability of rats to comprehend prime numbers. Their minds just don't go that far.
We are animals who evolved a certain way, and we see the world in that way.
And it may well be that we are incapable of finding certain truths about the universe because of our low capacity.
That doesn't invalidate what we *do* find and test.
Science is a human endeavor that attempts to find truths about the universe. it does so via successive approximations and testing.
There is no claim that it finds 'ultimate reality' or that human biases don't exist. Nonetheless, it does manage to find out things about the universe.
Maybe, just maybe, if we find another race with more capacity, we can expand our understanding to the limit of our abilities or even have some of those limits pointed out to us. Until then, it is a human endeavor that attempts to deal with the biases we know about.
