Flat Earth OR Why Do People Reject Science? | Philosophy Tube

[Music] in this episode I'm gonna be talking about the philosophical view known as direct realism which is on the British philosophy a level syllabus as well as the modern myth and meme that the earth is flat and although the planet is in fact round it is not my intention today to mock or deride or even dispute anybody in particular who believes in the conspiracy when I first made this channel five years ago I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't ever use it to deliberately make anyone feel bad about themselves and I actually think the Flat Earth has present a pretty interesting philosophical challenge which goes like this part one what am I looking at it's a myth that people thought the earth was flat until Columbus tried to sail round it some ancient peoples did believe in a flat earth but the ancient Greeks and Indians figured out the shape of the planet about two and a half thousand years ago and societies that have been influenced by them have known the shape of the planet pretty much ever since Columbus knew the earth was round he just thought it was a lot smaller than it actually is he estimated that he would have just enough food and water to reach Japan which by a lucky coincidence was just about the distance to the Caribbean which nobody in Europe knew was there at the time I say lucky coincidence it was lucky for him it was obviously unlucky for the millions of people who ended up dead or enslaved as a result despite the fact that the shape of the planet has been known for a long time some people today however tiny a minority do in fact believe that the earth is flat if we can take them at their word the modern Flat Earth conspiracy actually started in the 1800s with the work of people like Samuel Rowbotham and William carpenter the latter being the author of 100 proofs the earth is not a globe carpenters proofs are varied one or two of them are theological quite a few of them are just him not knowing how things like gravity works which is fine not everyone does understand that and that's okay but one or two of them are very interesting philosophically because they claim that things appear a certain way and therefore they are that way for instance number 18 says the best possessions of man are his senses and when he uses them all he will not be deceived in his survey of nature it is only when someone faculty or other is neglected or abused that he is deluded every man in full command of his senses knows that a level surface is a flat or horizontal one but astronomers tell us that the true level is the curved surface of a globe they know that man requires a level surface on which to live so they give him one in name which is not one in fact since this is the best that astronomers with their theoretical science can do for their fellow creatures deceive them it is clear that things are not as they say they are and in short it is a proof that the earth is not a globe in other words the horizon appears to be flat and therefore it is flat this is an appeal to something like the philosophical position known as direct realism or sometimes naive realism which says simply that we perceive the world this of course entails the position that there is in fact a world out there outside of our minds that can be perceived and talked to that contrasts direct realism with indirect realism which is the idea that yes there is a world out there but we don't perceive it what actually happens is that objects in that world out there cause representations to appear in our brains and that's what we perceive these representations are sometimes called sense data for bonus points contrast direct realism and indirect realism with barclays idealism which is the position that there is in fact no world out there independent of our minds that can be talked about anyway and that to be is to be perceived i've talked more about barclays idealism elsewhere you can click that card that's just appeared at the top right if you want to hear more about it part two optical illusions nobody's gonna get that reference direct realism isn't wildly popular although it does have its defenders mainly because it's pretty easy to mount at least a decent stab at critiquing it one such critique is the argument from illusion I'm gonna be using the philosopher aja as my source here not because he was the first person to come up with these ideas by any means but because he writes very clearly and for that reason is beloved of British philosophy a-level teachers the argument from allusion goes like this sometimes we perceive things that aren't really there or so we think and therefore we can't be perceiving the world directly the classic example is a stick if you put it in water it appears to bend because of refraction and we know it isn't really bent it just appears that way in here but in fact flat earth would do just as nicely as an example we look at the horizon it appears to be flat because it's so big but actually it isn't ergo we are not perceiving the world directly we have a mental representation of a flat horizon but in fact there is no such thing it's just curved and really big an even stronger version of the argument from illusion might cite the fact that we can perceive contradictory things if I stand three feet in front of a mirror it will appear that I'm standing inside it three feet behind the surface I can't be in two places at once ergo one of those things must be false there must be sensed data in my brain that don't correspond to anything real out there in the world I said a jair wasn't the first person to talk about ideas like these and the philosopher john locke when he managed to spare time out of his busy schedule of being an enormous racist who's various moral and philosophical shortcomings I've discussed before came up with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities primary qualities are things that objects have in themselves like mass shape number secondary qualities arise from primary qualities but aren't really in the objects they're just in here like taste or color for instance we could say that these two apples appear to be red but aren't really red and we know it's just appearance because if we were to look at them under different lights or show them to people who are color blind then they wouldn't appear that way they just look that way to us because of the way their skin reflects light color is in here in a way that things like number and mass presumably aren't unless you agree with Berkeley arguably then if flat earthers are trying to appeal to die rate realism then maybe they're not being strict enough since they presumably don't also believe that sticks placed in water really do bend or that objects far away are just small carpenter did believe that the Sun orbits the earth and that the earth doesn't rotate but he at least acknowledged that things that are far away aren't just tiny part three science but all that's pretty standard stuff I know you don't come to philosophy tube just to watch me read out Wikipedia articles on philosophy in a sexy accent you come here to get mine so what's the really juicy stuff well it's tempting to say that when people deny scientific evidence about the shape of the planet or about climate change or vaccinations or whatever but there's a problem with them or at least that in investigating why they denied our investigation should begin with the person on YouTube you can find all kinds of channels that spend time debunking or sometimes outright mocking conspiracy theorists or a 911 truthers or climate change deniers or creationists or what have you but what if we're looking in the wrong place what if people denying scientific evidence has less to do with them and more to do with the nature of scientific claims themselves in her book the rhetoric of economics economists daydreamer clusky writes that whilst the scientific methodology proceeds according to experimentation and evidence any particular instance of someone making a scientific claim either out loud or in writing is an attempt to persuade their audience and those two are not the same thing consider the fact that scientific papers will cite other papers and reference the results of those experiments just as I cite authors in the bottom-left of the screen there when the author of a scientific paper cites another experiment unless they've explicitly repeated that experiment themselves McCluskey says they're essentially making an argument from Authority they're saying you can trust these results which isn't a scientific demonstration it's an attempt to persuade you McCluskey goes through some of the most famous papers in economics and explains how they attempt to persuade not to demonstrate using certain metaphors here a particular authorial voice there an appeal to Authority or to what often goes unstated she says is the implicit assumption that the book or the academic paper or the scientific experiment is worth writing up and if it's worth writing it must be worth it relative to some goal or set of values so you can understand now why a sociologist might tell us that science with a capital S is a social construct scientific methodology is not to be confused with any particular conversation about science or who decides how those conversations happen where and when they happen or with what allocation of topics and funding McCluskey says there's two parts to any scientific claim there's the evidence yes but there's also the rhetoric how it's said how it attempts to persuade is it simple we like things to be simple and elegant is there a nice diagram we like there to be nice diagrams what kind of metaphors does it use ooh that's a good one here's a famous example Galileo Galilei is credited with demonstrating that the Earth orbits the Sun people used to think that the Sun went round us and that we were the center of the universe the fact that Galileo persisted in his experiments despite persecution from the Catholic Church is held up in programs like neil degrasse tyson's cosmos as a vindication of science and the scientific method and by proxy of sigh tests themselves what Galileo observed through his telescope though was the changing phases of the planet Venus which would have been impossible to see if Venus orbited the earth the fact that Venus appears to us fully illuminated in the sky means that it must be on the far side of the Sun from us hence he observed that Venus orbits the Sun and this was the clincher in demonstrating to many people that the earth does too however note that this is an argument from some observable evidence yes but it's also an argument from analogy Venus orbits the Sun Venus is a planet like Earth therefore earth also orbits the Sun it's the analogy between Earth and Venus that's really the clincher here and that was not demonstrated and accordingly some astronomers of the time accepted Galileo's findings but didn't embrace the heliocentric model of a solar system with the Sun at the center right away some of them switched to what's called the Taconic model where yes all the other planets orbit the Sun but the Sun orbits the earth you might be inclined to treat McCluskey's ideas or similar ideas with disdain especially this science is a social construct rubbish in his paper why you should believe it the philosopher John Searle takes a big swipe at all this relativism as he puts it he writes the speech Act commits you to the truth of what you say and therefore to the existence of a fact in the world corresponding to that truth such speech acts are made from a point of view and typically within certain sorts of ways of thinking but the statements and assertions do not thereby become about the points of view or the ways of thinking trouble is I think Searles tilting at windmills here he's the terminally arguing that the world definitely exists and that it is a certain way whatever way that is and that we can talk about it and that's something that not a lot of people would disagree with with the possible exception of Berkeley the McCluskey ish point isn't that science is worthless or impossible far from it just that any particular scientific statement is always made in a social context that will affect greatly not necessarily even its truth but just how and whether that truth is taken up by anybody as well as the form of the statement itself and maybe even the ability to make it Searle also has a somewhat simplistic view of what counts as evidence probably everybody could agree to the general claim certain statements require certain standards of evidence however who decides what evidence will be accepted is often crucial practically speaking for instance the government of Ontario have in the past refused to accept oral testimony as evidence in land disputes with the Tamayo gamma initiative by people they say they'll only accept written documents as evidence which is a bit of a pisser if your culture relies a lot on oral testimony the rhetorical dimension of science might explain an awful lot you might explain how scientists and educated people can come to believe all kinds of weird nonsensical things for which there isn't really good evidence scientists mainstream scientists the majority of scientists used to believe that there was a demonstrable hierarchy of races or that you could tell somebody's race or their propensity to criminality by measuring the size and shape of their skull people used to believe that you could make populations overall healthier and happier by exterminating or sterilizing those with bad genes some people still believe that today in her book fatal invention bioethicists Dorothy Roberts demonstrates that even though it comes up again and again in multiple modern present-day scientific investigations race isn't even a sensible biological category at all these scientists weren't daft they'd studied Anatomy they'd seen and measured human skulls they were just persuaded that this was all true and the socially constructed conditions of persuasion lowered the bar of evidence that they needed to get over for their unstated goals and often their stated ones as well so bringing us around to Flat Earth again some of William carpenters proofs are very explicitly about not being persuaded number eight asks if the world is round why do ships navigate using maps that are printed flat instead of on a globe numbers 60 74 and 99 all say that scientists keep changing her mind about stuff and therefore they can't really know anything none of those have anything whatsoever to do with the evidence they just all note a failure to be rhetorically persuaded recall McCluskey's point that to do science at all is to presume often implicitly that it will further some goal so people can become suspicious of what the implicit goal of the scientist is NASA tells us that the world is round but why do they tell us that people say that vaccines are good for you why do they tell you that and if it's because they care about your health and our altruistic then why is there also a massive for-profit health care industry miles power here on YouTube is a popular explainer of science and deepankar of conspiracies and he gets countless accusations of being bribed by corporations with an agenda although these concerns are irrelevant to the scientific evidence itself they attack the individual attempted act of persuasion that any particular presentation of evidence in tales the historian Sylvia Federici refers to a process she calls the enclosure of knowledge the process from the 15th to the 17th centuries whereby knowledge was taken away and gated off by the witch hunts traditional knowledge ease and folk knowledge ease were criminalized medicine and women's reproductive care in particular were taken away from women and given to men as part of the program of social repression and mass murder there was the foundation of many of our ideas today in the world of capitalism born out of the witch hunts and out of slavery and colonialism a world of shadowy backroom deals mistrust collusion the government man who means well but has his own agenda massively powerful authority figures who don't seem to be accountable to anybody and the atomization of the old communal ways of living and knowing it's perhaps unsurprising that some people will say things like this I think the people in this country have had enough of experts with organization from acronym these saying don't take what I'm saying the wrong way I'm not advocating for a flippant or a relativist attitude towards scientific evidence I'm not even sure I would advocate for a live and let live attitude towards it since denying scientific evidence is sometimes actually really dangerous even fatal what I'm saying is it's maybe not actually that surprising that some people will doubt the very shape of the planet itself and say I don't need someone else with their own agenda to tell me what's what for my practical purposes which aren't yours the evidence of my own eyes is enough to quote John Locke himself the certainty of things existing in rerum Natura when we have the testimony of our senses for it is not only as great as our frame can attain to but as our condition needs maybe the fact that some people deny scientific evidence is less a bug with them as it is a feature of human conversations including scientific ones that some people will be persuaded by different techniques and how we all get on and live with each other in the face of that especially when denying evidence on things like climate change and vaccination can be really dangerous to everyone that's the great human challenge isn't it patreon.com slash philosophy tube is where fans of the show can donate and help keep it going alternatively paypal dot me slash philosophy tube is where you could make a one-time donation [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 406,555

Rating: 4.8868723 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, epistemology, flat earth, globe, nasa, science, berkeley, A.J. Ayer, rhetoric

Id: AGvGQSazaTM

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/wuliheron]

Philosophy 101, but a good presentation.

The obvious flaw with all of his arguments, are that they are all metaphysical arguments that obey classical logic, and totally ignore about the last fifty years of scientific evidence. Quantum Mechanics and fuzzy logic are analog, get over it already, learn analog logic, or stop waxing philosophical.

The simple explanation for the failure of all of his classical arguments, is that 42 is as good an answer as any, which is what all the evidence is steadily confirming. From the ground the earth looks flat, and it is easier for your brain to simply assume it is flat, it is more efficient for you to assume the earth is flat. Get over it. Nature is analog and does care about all your rationalizations. Nature is contextual, not classical.