The weight of human testimony

The first of what may be plural videos on the weight and value of human testimony vis-à-vis "hard" evidence. A mass of testimony regarding a phenomenon not entertained by academic or peer-reviewed science must not be called "merely anecdotal" - anecdotal evidence by definition (challenge me on this!) is a single instance of observation not corroborated by other observers and not (yet, at least) repeated on other occasions.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• evidence
• anecdotal
• testimony
• observation
• repeated

[LooksAeterna]

You're opening an extremely interesting question here.

The truth is that ALMOST ALL of the knowledge we completely rely on and trust in, AND THAT INCLUDES assumptions and procedures of the scientific method, is anecdotal or insufficient for being "scientific".

So this will one day have to be confronted by theorists of science and ultimately by all scientist: anecdotal evidence and naive experience is essential and mostly reliable.

How exactly does that figure into the scientific method ?

[Israe5l]

Did you know that when the scientists were making the atomic bomb, there had no hard-evidence that the bomb's chain reaction will stop. But they did it anyways.

[thomasmatus]

If I may challenge, not science itself or its methods, but the way it is done in practice: Are not scientists often culture-bound, choosing among observations and applications those that reinforce the hegemony of Western-Northern cultural areas? Is there not a general refusal to speak about, or even consider, experimentally-repeated observations that challenge a purely materialist & mechanistic world-view? Is this not due to science's contamination by military-industrial funding? Just asking.

[thomasmatus]

I'm trying to refine my notion of "human testimony," to make it clear that this notion does not include the German masses' adulation of Adolf Hitler, or the naive observation that the earth is flat and the heavens revolve around it. One element I can include is the cross-cultural convergence of experiences (e.g., as examined with appropriate skepticism by Carl Jung). I do see (based on my own studies) notable convergence between Sufi, Buddhist, & Christian mystics.

[Adipatus]

That community would also have to accept that a Korean scientist who was disgraced as a fraud actually cloned all kinds of animals and humans, based on his fallacious "testimony".

You can falsify testimony. You can't falsify hard evidence. That's a good reason to keep science as it is.

A billion people's testimony does not outweigh one piece of hard evidence, because even one billion people can be shown to be dead wrong by a single piece of hard evidence.

[Adipatus]

Accepting "testimony" into science would bring chaos and gut science. Science is based on the fact that the evidence speaks for itself. It does not require arguments, or testimonies, or a Holly Inquisition to impose it. It establishes itself.

If we did what you suggest, "the scientific community" would have to accept that "cold fusion" of hydrogen atoms is real and so we can get infinite energy from a cold glass of water based testimony of the lone two scientists who saw it happen.

[Adipatus]

My take is that it makes you uncomfortable that there is science which does not validate your philosophy or ideology. You might want to stop caring about it and fully believe what you want, without feeling self conscious about it.

Science and ideology will always follow different paths.

Science can only deal with "things", not spirits, hunches, whims, revelations, gods, values, faith, etc.

[Adipatus]

Because it would make no sense. Even you can't make sense of what you're saying. You won't even give examples of what you are talking about, let alone "hard evidence".

You can't have a science about nothing.

[Adipatus]

No.

[0ThouArtThat0]

it seems that anything which cannot be reproduced in a laboratory setting is too easily dismissed by the scientific community. I don't blame them for this necessarily, but they may be able to do a bit better. I am optimistic that things are beginning to open up, what with the recent Johns Hopkins study into the mystical effects of psilocybin. Anecdotal evidence will always be met with skepticism by scientifically minded folk, as it should. But skepticism should not lead to outright dismissal.