Looking back on my engineering degree, I remember having to do labs so that we could take the theory and actually build stuff.
But I also remember doing the labs for certain science subjects and always thinking how ridiculous it was to perform these experiments that had not much of a point. We were just doing the labs in order to get our expected theoretical results, nothing more.
The contrast between the engineering labs and the science labs were stark. The former required thinking, the latter recipe following.
Man, I learned so much from my chemistry labs:
That science is a human endeavor.
That the numbers NEVER work.
That scientests fudge the data, cause the numbers NEVER work, and it looks stupid to be so far off what the equations indicate are supposed to tbe the right numbers.
That the temptation to fudge the data is so strong, even when you know your grade does not depend on your result, you still fudge.
I loved my physics lectures and I hated the labs. In fact I *know* I probably would have taken more than the required minimum if I didn't have to take up a whole evening for lab.
In my lab group there were always 5 of us, of which me and two other guys usually ended up being the ones to do all of the experiments and the calculations. It got very tiring after a while, and the experiments weren't all that thrilling.
It was a shame though, becuase I know there are all sorts of really cool theories that I would have loved to learn more about, but we wasted so much time going over the homework problem sets and doing labs that I really didn't want to go much further.
While I agree that labs can be more and less beneficial as learning experiences, I'm leery of suggesting that science can really be learned without some kind of practical engagement. Whenever I teach pragmatism, and now teaching phenomenology for the first time, I have to take great pains to go over the fact that scientific truths don't just appear to a passive perceiver, but are based on interaction with a highly structured environment, using instruments to make calculations and then infer from those calculations something true about the world. The only examples from their lives I can draw on for this is their lab experiences, however inadequate.
Without some serious attention to how science is actually *done*, scientific information (including information *that* scientists engage in a particular method) becomes just one more fact to be absorbed or rejected by students haphazardly. It's that kind of thinking that makes students believe that creationism and evolution are just two equally available options--choose which statements you feel like believing.
Maybe there's a viable alternative to lab work that would also achieve this goal, but I think *some* sort of practical engagement would have to happen.
Your statistics are a little... off (and I'm anal-retentive about the subject):
... non-science students will take an average of zero science classes beyond the required two.
If the average really is zero, then it must be the case that absolutely no non-science student ever took a non-required science class. In which case, you can make the stronger assertion about the population itself rather than the statistic. I suspect, however, that the average is close to zero.
As to lab work...
Without some sort of lab work, science is just a different brand of theology. I conclude from your comments, however, that the actual implementation of lab education is seriously flawed.
As an academic philosopher, I think you're in a unique position to not only (justly) condemn the current educational philosophy of lab work as a necessary adjunct to every science class, but also push for reforming lab education to make it useful.
We need to teach students at least the basics about the experimental foundation of science. We need to teach them to be careful, that sloppiness introduces (at best) randomness or (t worst) bias. We need to teach them to be critical of naive interpretations. We need to teach them the value of controls. We need to teach them how to understand and apply statistical methods, and not just tell them to run a t-Test on SAS.
I suggest you push for a course: The experimental foundations of science. Take each of the above teaching goals (and anything else you can think of) and plan a unit around it: Construct an experiment that emphasizes the need for care. Construct the next where skepticism is necessary to overcome one's naive interpretation. And so forth.
Such a course would not only be extremely valuable for theoretical scientists, but would really hammer home the experimental foundations of science for nonscientists.
I hope you've read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. There's some extremely good stuff there about scientific experiments. Also, Feynman's Cargo Cult Science is an excellent related work.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
Now THAT is a great book.
Hoo boy, I had to rewrite this comment a few times. You got me on a sore spot here.
This:
Without some sort of lab work, science is just a different brand of theology.
is spot on. You simply cannot do, or understand, science without experimentation: there is no science without experimentation. This fundamental fact is something that the public seems (to me) utterly to fail to grok -- which is perhaps the most important and most miserable failure of science education. If you get this, you get science -- you can make use of scientific information, without being an expert yourself. If you don't get this point, science is an alien thing forever.
Here, as TBB points out, is a perfect opportunity for philosophy to prove to its detractors that it is, in fact, good for something. How do you suggest we improve the balance between lecture and lab without disconnecting students from the essential nature of science?
And yet the lesson anon got was quite the opposite.
But Anon nearly got it: that science is a human endeavour, that real datasets are frustrating and difficult things, and even that the temptation to fudge is great, is a large part of what I'm saying.
Anon just went a bit beyond what his/her observations will support: it's not that the numbers NEVER work, only that lab classes seldom generate good data. If the numbers NEVER "worked", we'd have no progress. (There's another important point there, too, about how the numbers are what they are, and it doesn't matter whether they work for your pet theory or not.) The same classes could have led Anon to useful (as opposed to reflexively cynical) conclusions.
he same classes could have led Anon to useful (as opposed to reflexively cynical) conclusions.
I don't know if the same classes could have led anon to different conclusions. I definitely think better classes would have had a much greater chance of leading anon to different conclusions.
I did college in two bursts: first, I tried to get my physics degree in three years. It's rough, but actually quite possible. I had only 12 credits remaining in my final semester when the two-and-a-half years of painful cramming, taking classes every summer and doubling up finally caught up to me. Out I dropped. I went back to school a couple of years after that and got a degree in computer science. That, required no extra effort.
When I studied physics, I only had a few lab classes, and only one physics lab. There was a chem lab and a bio lab, because I'd taken those as well, but almost all my physics classes were theory and math only. The chem and bio labs were pointless affairs, as both of these classes filled my school's undergrad science requirement, so the material was watered down for the masses. My one physics lab class was quite different, as it was an upper-level class designed just for the thirty or so of us in the department (and this is a pretty large university). We did real hands-on work and learned a ton, mostly about good data collection and error analysis. Still, it was the only science lab I ever took that was worth a damn.
Fast-forward to computer science...in effect, every class is a lab. All you do is apply theory to practice day in and day out. Those were useful "labs", capable of teaching almost all of the students and weeding out the very few who really just can't get it. As a craft, it's necessary to learn how to apply the craft, so we did.
I'm sure other sciences can have useful labs - chemistry and the biological sciences in particular - but at the end of my college education, I'd have been happier and more satisfied if I'd only had the one physics lab and skipped the intro-level wastes of TA's time. Which is exactly the opposite way I feel about computer science, because that was an education strictly intended to teach skills.
So I guess I agree with SteveG. If the point is to expose as many people as possible to scientific thought and theory, then tossing the labs is wise, at least at the intro level. If the point is to train practical scientists, then the labs are a requirement.
"If the point is to expose as many people as possible to scientific thought and theory, then tossing the labs is wise, at least at the intro level. If the point is to train practical scientists, then the labs are a requirement."
I think the point that at least some people here are generating is that the above is a false dichotomy.
I recognize that some people are saying that, but I don't believe it is a false dichotomy. Just like most students don't learn a thing from art survey classes, or minimal foreign language requirements, or intro computer classes, they aren't going to learn anything in an intro lab. In order to make it worthwhile, they need to spend a great deal of time and effort and need a solid grounding in theory. That's just not going to happen without a complete overhaul of undergraduate (hell, el-hi) education.
If the goal is to bring about that overhaul, I'll gladly storm the bastions by your side, though. Let's call it: 20 credits of science, with at least half lab credits; 20 credits of math; 20 credits of philosophy and logic; 30 credits of history; 40 credits of literature and writing; and another 50 credits in your specialty in order to graduate. At that point, I'd assume there'd be enough worth-while lab time. Mind you, that works out to about six years at 15 hrs/semester, but it would be an improved education, I think.
However, if we're just looking for a way to make labs better without an overhaul, I don't know what that would look like. Actually, I do. It would be three or four credit lab classes with no associated lectures or tests. Three to four hours a week just setting up experiments, collecting data, analyzing the results, and writing reports. All of which seems, to me, to require a pretty solid grounding in math and scientific theory first. In other words, the kind of grounding that freshmen who aren't entering the sciences just don't have.
Just like most students don't learn a thing from art survey classes, or minimal foreign language requirements, or intro computer classes, they aren't going to learn anything in an intro lab.
I dont have a dog in the fight, but ? and I repeat ?? If its just like that, then its just like other false claims. Students do learn from art survey classes (Thank you, Intro to Archeology, for learning something about ancient art) and from foreign language requirements (thank you for the German I know that helped me hitch hike through Germany) and intro to computer science (thank you basic class in high school). So maybe they will learn things from intro lab.
BTW at UT, they did lab through a computer program! I have no idea what the hell that was supposed to teach, but I took Chem lab for Chem majors (even though I wasnt one) and I learned a lot from it... on top of anon's lesson, which I, too, learned. One thing I learned is that acid is dangerous for jeans.
I agree. Some students would learn from an intro lab, just as some students learn from the other examples I gave. Some, in my loose English here, meaning a small subset of all, as opposed to the large subset I was indicating by most. As a self-selected group of odd folk who comment on SteveG's blog, I'm pretty sure our academic successes and failures cannot be used as a predictor for the majority of students.
The best I can say is that the relatively unselected group of students with whom I took intro labs did not seem to learn much. Neither did the majority of students in any other intro-level class I took.
Bear in mind, I'm an elitist prig who thinks we teach too broadly and not deeply enough on any subjects.
Science here was taught for many years as a "hands on approach." In other words science was taught according to the scientific process or model.
Today, this happens less so. It takes a good knowledge of science and the scientific process to create learning experiences of this type. Those who have a sound knowledge of science, tend to go where the money is, and it isn't in education.
Bravo, SteveG. For once I am in full agreement with you. Many on here who address the need for labs, blah, blah, blah, are talking about themselves. We have a crisis in academia, most students do not like science, do not like taking science classes, and many I advise feel they learn very little in science, especially lab. How do we educate an anxiety ridden "I hate science" student? We need to teach the sciences differently than they're being taught if we hope to educate 'science hating' students. Many blame the students for not being focused, but perhaps part of the problem is how science is being taught. And if SteveG is right - that many of our pressing human issues involve science - we're in trouble if most students do not understand (to some degree) socio-scientific politics.
What I loved the most about my college science classes were the emphasis (which is not true of most college science classes) on the experiments which showed why scientests believe these theories. It made the reasoning process more clear, and made science science instead of dogma.
"Many on here who address the need for labs, blah, blah, blah, are talking about themselves."
Blah blah blah. That's nice.
As one of the people who was *not* talking primarily about herself, I have to reiterate the importance of *some* practical encounter with the scientific process as a means of resistance to the currently polarized response in our culture to merely hearing *about* scientific theory. Either science is rejected as a collection of "beliefs" that this nerdy group called "scientists" happen to think true, or it gets deified by otherwise circumspect people and scientists become the new priesthood. Opposite conclusions, common cause....a lack of understanding of how science is done.
It certainly sounds like traditional labs are problematic to many people. Fine, let's think creatively about this. How, besides merely *telling* them, do we get across to students how it is that scientific truths are discovered?
I, for one, think students are learning more and more narrowly, and not nearly broadly enough. A smattering of distribution requirements alone does not constitute a liberal arts education. So this is by no means an argument that the status quo "two sciences w/lab" is working well.
A couple of comments,
Without some sort of lab work, science is just a different brand of theology.
I'm not sure I buy this for a couple of reasons. First, scientists accept the veracity of data they haven't themselves produced or reporduced all the time, I don't see why understanding what came out of the Michelson-Morley experiment requires me to actually DO the experiment. Indeed, I'm not sure the afternoon I spent counting the damn fringes deepened my understanding of special relativity or the late 19th century debate over dragged vs. stationary ether theories in the least. Yes, science involves observation, but we're talking about teaching science not training scientists here and I'm not sure that not seeing with your own eyes really is the magic bridge to the land of science.
Second, in all the labs I did I never really found God...in fact, I was never even getting results of the proper order of magnitude. And that's the point, the procedures so clunky, the directions so cookbook, the results so bad that you didn't really get confirmation in any meangful sense.
But most importantly, you never got the sense that you were doing science. There was no thoughtfulness in trying to figure out how to test something. There was no curiosity around what would you see. There was no sense that you were confirming anything. There was no sense in which you were actually connected or invested in the experiment. It was not an on-going project in optics or thermodynamics that really got you hooked, it was the pedagogical version of "If This is Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium."
Finally, I'm certainly not advocating the abolition of lab classes but wondering whether they are needed as often as they are required. They may not be harmful and may be helpful, but are they maximally helpful when we look at the real costs in time of instructor time, student time, and pedagogiccal and curricular resources lost.
"Without some sort of lab work, science is just a different brand of theology."
I'm not sure I buy this for a couple of reasons. First, scientists accept the veracity of data they haven't themselves produced or reporduced all the time, I don't see why understanding what came out of the Michelson-Morley experiment requires me to actually DO the experiment.
Sigh.
You're missing my point. First, good scientists do not accept the veracity of data they haven't themselves produced: That's why they reproduce it. Second, there are strong institutional procedures for ensuring that the data is reported honestly and accurately—procedures for which scientists have the same sort of evidential justification for trusting as they do for their primary work.
Counting fringes is not going to help you understand the speed of light. But you (and I) need to do it anyway, and learn why and how we did it wrong and learn to do it right.
You might take the evidentiary basis of science for granted (and I know I'm accusing you of a a mortal philosophical sin), but there are millions of people, including college graduates, who never lose the belief that scientists are making things up in the exact same sense that theologians (or (some) philosophers) are making things up.
Everyone needs to know how and why we believe scientific truth, how and why we believe the speed of light to be 299,792.5±1 km/s.
It's just as important is for people to know about the specific difficulties and pitfalls of scientific experimentation. When global warming deniers charge that climatologists' data are "sloppy", or that their methodology is "flawed", people need a basis for understanding and evaluating these charges.
We don't all have to become experimental scientists, but anyone who fancies herself "educated" should have no excuse for not having such a basis. Anyone who fancies himself an educator should have no excuse for not teaching that basis.
TBB beat me to it; I would add one small quibble. Steve's right that scientists typically don't reproduce, that is, physically repeat, other scientists' published experiments. Instead, the same or consistent observations are more usually made in the course of experiments predicated on the assumption that the published work can be trusted (was done properly and reported accurately). Verification is more usual than direct replication (in other words, what TBB said about "strong institutional procedures"). See here for more detail, and here for a lengthy discussion of related issues.
It's important to note that this small quibble in no way detracts from TBB's main points about teaching how scientific data are obtained and why we believe them.
I, I appreciate your comments and I'm sorry if saying "blah, blah, blah" was unfriendly. I was playing around on the playground. I understand why my comments might be heard as unfriendly, but I didn't mean them that way. I chuckled that you took them personally. For, I wasn't actually addressing your earlier comments. In fact, I'm not sure how what I said disagreed with your earlier comments. I agree that science needs practical applications and our present way of teaching science, in my opinion, is not providing the average student with this practical knowledge.
Student labs are like Feynman's Cargo Cults--a going through of the motions, or "science theater" or "play science." Those among the students who go on to lab work in grad school or as technicians are primed by the experience. Others learn a little science content and experience a deluge of true and false impressions of what it's like to do science, between which they are unlikely to be able discriminate reliably or at all. Brilliant teachers teach brilliant labs, but the credit goes to the teacher, not the format.
Several comments:
1) Most science labs are pretty useless in training people. At every institution I've ever been at, we've always had to assume that the undergraduates did not learn adequate technique, and reteach them ourselves.
2) Most labs are 'cookbook' (particularly for the intro courses) and are not intellectually stimulating. They do not shed any light on what it is like to do laboratory research.
3) Lab courses should be taught as stand-alone courses, which would actually make the labs vitally important for learning (unlike those in intro courses).
4) At schools with science requirements, at least one science course should be a lab course (see #3).
I don't remember science classes having much theory. It is 95% mathematics and/or rote memorization. And no way as an undergraduate would I voluntarily take a science class designed primarily to weed out students.
The labs are usually about following steps like a cookbook. Not much understanding going on.
I have some experience in engineering and science education, it's one of the main things I research. For example we tested the conceptual knowledge of undergraduates who had completed multiple courses on electrical circuits, and they often knew the equations but not the behavior underlying them. I created an animated circuit simulation and within minutes of tutoring you see improvements in their understanding.
p.s. Blogger has its own comment system now. It's a lot better than haloscan.
I am sorry Steve you had such poor teachers in undergrad but mine for the most part were great. You actually learned and were forced to think & analyze data. Some of it was theoretical work, other times it was a wet lab experience. The problem is not having labs, it is usually they are poorly executed. A few of the intro labs I had needed to be changed but most of them were not like that. What is required are good teachers and probably more of them in the sciences. Of course that requires real effort and real change.
While I understand where you are coming from, I must disagree with your logic. You talk about the time it takes for students to spend in lab classes. Students spend years more learning subjects like English and math than they ever do science. To spend a semester or two taking lab classs in college doesn't seem excessively demanding in the grand scheme of things.
However, I also think that there are lab classes that are poorly designed, as are many science lecture courses. Science education could stand a major overhaul, but there doesn't seem much will to do it, despite all the education research that shows how it could be done.
Steve:
As another philosophy and physics major, I sympathise with your frustration that lab courses are sucking away resources that could be better spent on courses that emphasise conceptual issues. My personal experience is that I learnt next to nothing about the scientific method, or about how scientific research proceeds, from my formal lab courses. Everything I learnt about the process of real scientific research was in my research project under the supervision of a professor. I would not say that it is theoretically impossible to design a lab course that can give a similarly instructive education, instead of merely forcing students to go through certain meaningless procedures. However, it seems to me that most physics labs do not do this. For some reason, biology labs seem to do a better job of making labs "meaningful".
leornian:
Science majors spend far more than a semester or two on lab courses. Furthermore, the time commitment demanded of a typical lab course is usually several times that of a humanities course. Spending time on lab courses per se is not undesirable. It's spending time on ineffective lab courses that is. Unfortunately, lab courses tend to be shoved onto the curriculum without any regard for whether they're effective.
Ponder Stibbons:
You missed the point of my post. Which is, don't dump the lab classes, make them useful. If a non-science major takes one or two lab classes, that's not such a time committment compared to the years spent on other things. And I don't know why you think a lab class is more time committment than reading and writing papers for a humanities class, I never found it so (I actually did all the reading and writing required). For science majors, they need to spend the time taking lab classes to learn their field, but they need good classes, where they can develop skills, not follow a cookbook.
I have the job of teaching science at a school that proposes that "students encounter the perspectives and modes of inquiry and analysis that characterize academice disciplines" while they take their two point zero science classes, one with lab. Since they are supposed to encounter the modes of inquiry rather than some guy standing in front of a room relating stories about the modes of inquiry, we teach labs. If you want to learn about ceramics, you throw pots. If you want to learn about music then you play or compose. Sure, you can learn art history or music criticism without being an artist or a musician, but can you really understand those fields without at least having tried? I suppose I could try and teach the sociology of science, but I'm not a sociologist. I'm a chemist. So I teach chemistry.
Are the students doing "real" science in their intro labs? I'll grant that precious few papers in the literature are generated in intro chem classes. But I would also be surprised if the philosophy journals are chock full of papers written by Philosophy 101 students. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I am, then a lots of folks are wasting a lot of time in philosophy graduate school. I suppose we could stop teaching introductory labs to kids who don't want to major in science as long as nobody who took a science class ever got interested in the subject and decided to switch majors. Fortunately sometimes students do reflect on their educational goals and some of those students decide to switch into the sciences. That is more difficult once you are tracked into the "non-science major" course.
Just to address a couple of your points quickly so I can go back to prepping my labs:
1. I don't think most colleges charge lab fees anymore. Gettysburg certainly doesn't.
2. Almost none of the intro labs at Gettysburg are taught by regular faculty. I love teaching intro lab. I almost never get the chance. If people won't team-teach it is probably an upper level lab that is keeping them busy.
3. As to our small footprint, most intro science courses at Gettysburg enroll more than forty students, typically 45-50 and sometimes as many as 60. Humanities classes rarely exceed 30.
leornian:
I don't think anyone here would disagree that if lab classes could be made useful, then we don't have to dump them. My complaint is that labs continue to be held whether they are useful or not. It is my considered opinion that a lot of labs are not useful.
As for labs for non-science majors, yes they don't take a lot of time. I was speaking for the science majors whose souls are stomped on by the dinosaur of neverending labs.
I also do all the reading and writing for my philosophy courses. A lab for an advanced undergrad physics course takes up ten hours a week (including lab report writing time). These labs are held in conjunction (within the same course) with normal lectures 3 hours a week, and with weekly problem sets and lab reports. I typically spend 10 hours a week on the problem sets as well. This means 23 hours a week for one physics course, not considering extra hours clocked preparing for midterms. (I hear they have it worse at the MIT.) I have not encountered a humanities course that required 23 hours a week of work. I have spent more than 23 hours a week on a humanities course before, when I was working on major papers. However, I do not spend 23 hours a week every week on each humanities course, since major assignments do not occur every week. A typical courseload here is four courses a quarter. If each course took 23 hours, I would have to spend 11 hours a day, including weekends, on homework and lectures/labs. If that is the kind of workload you had as a humanities student, then I salute you.
It seems I can't do arithmetic. 4x23/7 = 13. I would have had to spend 13 hours a day, 7 days a week, on schoolwork. A tad unreasonable, I think.
Ponder Stibbons:
I don't know why you seem to keep arguing with me, as we appear to be largely in agreement, that lab classes should not be dropped but fixed to be useful.
I think this is a truly great post. I've posted most of my thoughts over at my blog,
http://the-inquiring-mind.blogsp...-skip-
labs.html
so I won't repeat them here.
I do have to say that I think many of the commenters are misunderstanding the boundaries of what you've outlined here. Moreover, I think that some of the arguments against what you propose seem to rely on an falsely rosy picture of the world of higher education.
Good stuff.
At Cornell, many science courses do not have lab courses. In addition, some have optional lab courses.
For instance, introductory biology is split into two 2 credit classes, the lab and lecture portion. You can take the lecture without the lab, or vice versa. Introductory genetics is 5 credits, but there's also an option to take a 3 credit version which is the same course but without a lab.
Intro to neurobiology doesn't have a lab, but it does have a section. If you take it with the section (which has about 2 labs) it's 4 credits. Without it, it's 3.
No non science majors take these courses, period. I know one person who took genetics without the lab- he's an applied engineering physics major interested in going into biophysics.
Non science majors don't take science courses because of the lab, they take them because they're HARD. The only people that take genetics are premeds and biology majors, because it's difficult. Non science majors don't want to kill their GPA because of something they aren't interested in! It can't get more simple than that.
My husband teaches physics and I teach sociology at a regional university. I think you are not necessarily reflecting many science professors' loads. I teach 4 classes - 3 credits each, but he teaches 3 classes - 4 credits each. But he has labs of 4 hours per week with each of those classes -- so he sees students more hours a week than I do. I think it is unfair to say many science teachers teach one class and its associated classes - -maybe at elite schools, but certainly not where we are.
i need help on ''what is science''
LOL. You really DON'T grasp science. Science, and The Scientific Method, are ALL about experimental proof. If you didn't learn anything in the labs, it's because you spent all your time trying to get the mechanics down without paying attention to what was being demonstrated.
Yeah, labwork is BORING. But it's where actual Science comes from. Theory is nothing but people trying to explain why the lab results are what they are. Valuable, but not Real Science.
Einstein's ideas were certainly beautiful, but did not mean JACK SHIT until someone sat down and figured out how to verify them.
And Ether Physics, too, was quite beautiful and explained everything, until one lone experiment, the Michelson-Morley Experiment, blew the entire BODY of theory about light-propagation out of the water forever.
Current ideas in particle physics, the so-called Standard Model, have their own Michelson-Morley moment coming when CERN ramps up the LHC to full operation. Within minutes, experiments should show if the Higgs Boson exists or not. If it is confirmed, then the guesswork behind the Standard Model will be confirmed as at least largely true. If they fail, then the SM goes right out the window, and theory will have to start from scratch to explain the Real World Lab Results.
============================
Experiment is everything.
Given the choice between a dozen geniuses in the lab or a couple of idiots who can do field work, take the idiots. It is more important to observe the facts accurately than to be able to interpret them, because if you observe enough of them, they'll explain themselves.
- David Gerrold, "A Matter For Men"
> i need help on ''what is science''
Vanessa, people often confuse "Science" with "Technology".
Science is "The Scientific Method", a set of rules for conducting experiments and making theories that intertwine with them to provide a body of generally reliable information.
It helps distinctify
What We Know
What We Suspect
What We Don't Know
What We Can't Know (in the scientific sense).
In general, if it isn't testable, it's not science (See "Intelligent Design").
If you refuse to test it, then it's not science (see "Global Warming" proponents).
In short, it's a means to apply a measure of how reliable a thought or idea about the way the world works is, along with a means to find ways to increase the reliability of that thought or idea.
That this technique is highly effective is shown by direct evidence around you -- the TVs televise, the CDs play music, the Planes fly, and the Cars zoom down the road. The Bridges span, the Spires aspire, and the Mars Rover roves. All these things could not work if the Science weren't producing some fairly reliable information.
So when some philosophical idiot tries to tell you that there is no objectively knowable information, ask if he'll prove that by standing in front of a moving bus. 'Cause I think we ALL KNOW what the result is going to be, if he does.
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