Scientific Reality

The short answer: Scientific Reality is a Goal

Language is the  Problem with Reality and Science

Humans invented languages sometime in the dim past to describe things and ideas that they saw around them with their limited senses.

Eventually rules were added to the languages to convey more precise meaning.  Things like gender, number, and tense added to clarity.  One of humanity’s earliest discoveries was two genders, presumably before language made gender roles real.

Without waiting for actual discoveries,  people added words to their vocabulary to describe what they thought might explain phenomena like thunder and lightening, or even just the unreachable sky.  A thunder god was a natural explanation for the unexplainable. Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor were just a few of worldwide Thunder Gods. and Sky Dieties.

Words, grammar, and world view created by language became a reality that persisted even in the face of new discoveries. For centuries social conformity demanded respect for the accepted paradigm. Titles of nobility allowed Lords to persist until the present in an otherwise enlightened Great Britain.  O senhor in Portuguese is still the more formal of “you,” for a male while você and tu serve the same purpose for familiar males and females. In most western languages, there is little doubt about the gender of anything. Das Mädchen, the German neuter little girl is a bit of a historical mystery. Of course there is no requirement for grammatical gender to match genetic reality.

Mark Twain  does a remarkable job of showing how language departs from reality in his essay, “The Awful German Language.”

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

 

See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
“Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip ?
“Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
“Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden ?
“Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.”

Humans are Social Animals

Humans are social animals and tend to go along with the herd when new social fashions come into vogue. Then the words change to conform to a new fashion regardless if the fashion represents scientific reality.  In early 2025, do you accept that there are unlimited genders, or has the definition of the turnip changed?

Succeeding generations inherit their understanding of reality from ancestors through the old words.  Even when new knowledge changed what the words should actually mean, it often takes many years for current generations to accept or understand the evolving concept carried by a word.

Consider the word atom.

What is an ATOM?  In 400 BC, Democritus called it atomos, uncuttable; it was the smallest extent to which anything could be divided.  His marvelous insight led him to teach that nothing exists except space, atoms, and peoples’ opinions.

Plato and Aristotle didn’t like Democritus’ ideas so progress was stalled until the 15th century when a poet named Thomas Norton used the word attomes once in his poem, “The Ordinal of Alchemy.” (Substance resolving in Attomes with wonder;)  It’s obvious from his 3,102 line poem about alchemy that attom that Norton meant an attom to be the smallest extent to which anything could be divided.

No longer are we sure what the smallest division is. Atoms of matter are composed of smaller particles, if they can even be characterized as particles. They sometimes behave like energy.

 A gluon is a massless particle  involved in keeping a  fundamental particle called quarks together so they can form hadrons, which in  turn combine to form neutrons and protons. Every high school student, knows about the nucleus of atoms but how long will it be for high school students to knowingly talk about dark matter, dark energy, and neutrinos, assuming they all actually exist?  Some have suggested that dark energy is just worn out light, which we all agree exists but is light a particle (photon) or wave?  Could it be that the double-slit light experiment that shows light is both a particle AND a wave is a case of finding what an observer was looking for?

“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.”

Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 1920
English astronomer (1882 – 1944)  

 

What we now call science evolved from people who questioned what they saw around them. They eventually became knows as philosophers and teachers.  Now we call them scientists. They invent new words like strange quarks, Higgs bosons, and tau neutrinos  to put names on things that cannot be  really be understood, even by using that other language with its own set of words – mathematics.

Kinds of Reality

There are many kinds of human reality. Religion has historically been a place that dictated human reality and continues to do so. Few of the billions of people fighting for resources on the planet depart from their religious reality even after they reject the magical aspects. Most people simply assume that their basic world view is correct and everyone else is different if not outright wrong.

What people perceive as reality is their own consciousness coupled with frail senses that evolved to assist with physical survival. Then they add their tribal or religious reality to the way they view the word. Overcoming the limitations placed on their rational understanding, or call it their scientific understanding, by societal norms is almost impossible. Humans are social, tribal, herd animals.

To suggest that there exists a superior kind of reality, namely scientific reality, is itself open to skeptical examination. At best it can be accepted as a goal. Hard nosed highly trained scientists can be  among the worst true believers when they doggedly defend their favorite theories.

Belief

Beliefs are useful brain shortcuts to help us quickly deal with what life throws at us without having to stop and analyze every detail with our limited senses. Maintaining strong personal beliefs that coincide with the beliefs of the human animals that make up our herd, pack, or flock make it easier to stay integrated into the group for self identity, physical safety, and access to resources to stay alive.  Belief can be very comfortable even if it is totally fake. Is it comforting to contemplate the idea that each of us is an insignificant ant and neither the other ants in the anthill nor the universe will miss us when we are gone? It’s not a comforting thought so most people will not believe it, even if it happens to be true.

Skepticism

Skepticism is the opposite side of the belief coin. It’s another useful brain shortcut that helps humans quickly  avoid the folly of dogmatic belief without spending a lot of time analyzing what we think we are seeing or hearing.  A paradox exists when people label themselves as skeptics and then dogmatically believe their own closely held biases. Skepticism is just a shortcut, a jumping off point to in-depth critical thinking.

Critical Thinking

Professor Robert Ennis, formerly at the University of Illinois defined critical thinking as  a “reasonable, reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”  Over a lifetime he expounded his ideas about critical thinking in numerous publications. The goal of critical thinking is to attempt to understand reality. (Click the yellow link, his name, for an excellent outline he published in 2011. It gets into the weeds a bit. The references to his work are useful for a deep dive into his thought.)

So is critical thinking really possible?

Probably not for most of us. We are bound by our languages into preconceived ideas, and beliefs. They are dictated by the very words we use.

Mathematics is a less encumbered language.  but even that gets bogged down by the linguistic definitions of the variables and constants.

Scientific Fraud

Can scientific reality really be understood if scientists themselves are compromised?

There is bit of an epidemic of  scientific misconduct, malfeasance, and outright fraud going on worldwide.  Publish or perish means hundreds of thousands of bad papers are being publish annually.

Click HERE to go to Retraction Watch, a Skeptics favorite website.

If we can’t believe scientists and doctors. whom can we believe?   Certainly we  can believe most of them some of the time if you train yourself to look through the BS. But can you trust your own BS?