I wonder if truth can be reached through other means than scientific research. If this is the case, what does it imply for other human activities?
There are many other ways to reach other kinds of truth that those produced by scientific research. Science is often dogmatic, and doesn't accept a lot of knowledges, or takes a long time to make them conform to its principles and rules. And it is also influenced by other dogmatims: theological ones, philosophical ones, political ones, etc. At the beginning of the XVIIthe Century for example, Giordano Bruno was burned on a pyre because he posed the idea of infinity in the Universe, and later Gallilée was condemned by the Church to retract for some simillar reasons. Actually, some paradigms are so powerfull that it's impossible to work out of them without being excluded of the official science: see about that the book of Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" or the one of Karl Popper, "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge". And what one can think about my grandmother who left school when she was ten year old and who succeeded in to take care of me when I was young with herbal infusions and traditional medicines: was it a scientific knowledge? Certainly not. And yet ...
Dear Christian, science cannot be dogmatic, however your references to Kuhn and Popper sound good. Did your grandmother practice scientific methods? Yes , the efficacity of her medical practice of fytopharmaceutics was based on try and error. The results were repeatable and reproducible. Did she analyse her medical action according to a scientific method, of course not.
Dear Guido, inside a strong paradigm and the rules of "publish or perish", the science can become dogmatic. Or if not, it can deny the knowledges that does not obey to its rules of the proof, of the induction and of the deduction, of the determinism and of the causality in a cartesian way. Today, some works in quantic mechanics (the entanglement) and in astrophysics make that more and more scientists begin to think that those principles and those of the positivism are not so infallible. When reading the correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel price of quantic mecahnics) and Carl Gustav Jung (pshycologist), on what they called "synchronicity" were the beginning of this new questioning: here is an example of the way to one (I don't write THE) truth reached through other means than scientific research.
Thank you for this very rich debate.
in that case i prefer to speak about a shift of paradigm in the scope of QM. A dogmatic science shift to an idealogy and for God´sake beware us from that
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