Comments on: Data on “Facts” and Facts on “Data”

By: Mike Perkins

Mike Perkins — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:23:49 +0000

Someone, I think it was Stephen Jay Gould (and he may have been quoting someone else), said the “a fact is something for which there is so much evidence that to deny conditional acceptance would be perverse”. Always sounded like a workable definition to me.

By: Jdhuey

Jdhuey — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:16:26 +0000

WRT @8 : Funny you should mention Hooke’s Law in this regard because in my high school physical science class my experience was very different. The first day we were given a bunch of different strength springs and a set of standard weights and instructed to measure the spring displacements. We then spent the last half of the class aggregating the data from the different students and then derived Hooke’s law from the results. Admittedly, the teacher was herding us toward the correct result but the lesson that was being taught was not what Hooke’s law was but on how to extract regularities from experimental data.

I don’t know how high schools and colleges teach science nowadays but way back in the 60’s and 70’s the emphasis, at least in my school, was primarily on the process.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:09:26 +0000

find t crazy

9 records

Clearly, we are not crazy enough.

By: Arun

Arun — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:58:33 +0000

Anne said it regarding science.

—

As to other things, we deal in facts all the time. E.g., at a particular period on Oct 13, 2009, policeman X either fired his weapon or didn’t. Or the President said such and such or didn’t. Obama was either born in Hawaii or not. And so on. Seemingly independent of theoretical framework

By: Sam Gralla

Sam Gralla — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:23:34 +0000

Nice post =)

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:42:28 +0000

@6: I quickly tried some searches with the Arxiv, and unfortunately the abstract search doesn’t list the number of hits if there are too many, and the full-text search does but crashes or reports syntax errors on some of the words of interest. So I wouldn’t trust the results too much even for the results that do turn up.

@2: It seems to me that people think that scientists are fact merchants because in science classes what we teach is almost always the results of science, not science. In an introductory physics course, for example, you might be taught Hooke’s law (extension of a spring is linear in the force applied). Hooke’s law is the result of Hooke doing some science. But you are not doing any science, or even being told how to do science; you are being told a fact. You are then required to reproduce and apply this fact on the assignments, midterm, and/or final exam.

If you have a lab section of the course, you may be asked to perform a procedure to show that the spring you are handed follows Hooke’s law. This is slightly closer to doing actual science: in principle you might actually find out that Hooke’s law was not appropriate for this particular spring. But in most physics lab courses, what you are expected to do when your data fail to match the model is mumble something about “experimental error” and hope the TA doesn’t take off marks. It’s not until much more advanced courses, or maybe graduate school, that you are actually given a question and asked to do some science: to figure out the answer for yourself by observing the world.

So for people who haven’t reached that point, it looks a lot like science is a big collection of facts, and the job of scientists is to convey those facts to you. The idea that people are figuring out new facts as we speak, or that some of those new “facts” are actually hotly debated, is very rarely conveyed.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:14:39 +0000

Michael, I don't think that, no. The phlogiston theory of combustion is certainly not the best explanation for the evidence we have.

By: Igor Khavkine

Igor Khavkine — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:51:30 +0000

The arXiv has allowed full text search of its contents for a while now (can be found under Advanced Search). However, the results would have to be filtered for rhetorical uses of some words, as in the expressions “the fact that” or “in theory”.

By: FUG

FUG — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:38:33 +0000

What about something like the Atomic Theory of matter, the Germ Theory of disease, or any other number of old hypothesis that are in the 99.999% chance of being a fact? Is there not a “limit” when a theory becomes what we think of as facts?

Evolution is on par with those theories. As long as we are comfortable with thinking of the atomic theory as a fact, then we should feel just as comfortable with evolution.

By: Bee

Bee — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:17:34 +0000

The issue isn’t with the facts, but with the “is.” Spacetime “is” curved (as a matter of fact) in your book. But what “is” spacetime “really?” Oh-oh. You get around that by talking about data. Data is data. You don’t say the data “is” spacetime. Or is it ;-p

The reason why we use the word hypothesis so rarely is that nobody knows what the plural or genitive is.