Dell has always been a horrible company. Their main mechanism of enrichment in the early 2000’s was selling cheap, unusable laptops stuffed with spyware to poor people. In fact, Dell, Lenovo, and HP were so notorious that BestBuy literally created the GeekSquad to capitalize on the fact that Dell’s laptops were infected with spyware and needed to be “cleaned” before they could be useful.

I find it inexplicable that people can regard Dell’s products with anything besides skepticism and disgust. The CEO of Dell is also famously a barely sentient ignoramus.

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I will never buy anything at Starbucks again. Used to spend like $100/month.

Hope it was worth it.

Look, here’s my point more concisely: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any. Given that science is ostensibly just the activity that scientists engage in, and all of them do peer review, that’s probably important, right?

When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from other, similar activities. The fact that my efforts encounter a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation” or “fact finding”. If science could be captured with such broad strokes, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!

Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth, apparently without reproducibility or peer review. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.

What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review seems to be an indispensable feature of science. Do you have your own definition or suggestions?

P.S. just for future discussions, please don’t use Wikipedia for philosophy or mathematics. It’s a good resource of dates and names but that’s about it. For philosophy you can use textbooks or the Stanford Encyclopedia.

I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” throughout history, such as Newton, actually considered themselves natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’t make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isn’t — need counter examples). The Royal Academy of Sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon had pointed out that “science requires an intellectual community” (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — standing on the shoulders of giants and all that).

Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’m guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.

Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’t science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.

Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results,“ which is what Elon Musk seems to think.

I did follow your link to UC Berkeley (the first one I clicked), and wouldn’t you know it, as I expected, they claim the following:

Huh, look at that. Apparently involving “the scientific community” is part of science.

Again, this is from your link, which you didn’t read, I assume because your patron saint, Dunning-Kruger, frowns on reading.

See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.

For example, here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Science is a complex epistemic and social practice that is organized in a large number of disciplines, employs a dazzling variety of methods, relies on heterogeneous conceptual and ontological resources, and pursues diverse goals of equally diverse research communities.”

Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science” is misguided. If everything is “science” then nothing is “science.”

Your last sentence is pure poetry.

Before the 20th century most famous physicists referred to themselves as “natural philosophers,” not scientists. The P in PhD is for philosophy. The word “science” refers to a modern social phenomenon, a sort of peer-review methodology that generates shared public knowledge.

We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you please, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use that word. That’s why we have multiple words for similar phenomena, and if you ignore the definitions then you can’t make yourself understood.

Science is a specific social activity that humans engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or reasoning. It’s a particular method of peer review that generates shared public knowledge.

Again, “science” is something humans do together. Experimenting, investigating, puzzling, hypothesizing, intuiting, discovering, and knowing are all things you can do alone.

Science is strictly a social activity. You can’t have a social activity without the social component.

Again, fact-finding is not the same as science.

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