My best hope for this thread is for people who are working to help reduce animosities and hostilities across lines of alienation, to see more clearly how theories from the sciences are being misused in those hostilities. I see deeper reasons for those hostilities, but even so, seeing more clearly how those theories are being misused has been helpful for me, so maybe it could be helpful for some other people too.
One way that I see them being misused is using them as reasons for denouncing and ridiculing other people’s beliefs, and for disparaging their character and capacities. Associated with that is thinking of some theories as being true, or right, in some way that makes it okay to denounce and ridicule people, and disparage their character and capacities, if they persist in not believing those theories.
One way to see more clearly how theories are being misused might be to consider some healthy and beneficial ways of using them. I’m using flat maps of the earth’s surface to explain my ideas about healthy and beneficial ways of using theories. A map is not true or right in any way that makes all other maps false or wrong, without specifying for whom, for what purposes, and in what circumstances.. It can be true in the sense that if a person uses it to measure distances, angles or areas, in whatever way it’s designed to be used, their measurements will be accurate within the tolerances that it’s designed for. It can be the right map for some people to use for some purposes, in some circumstances, in the sense of being the best one available for those people, for those purposes, in those circumstances. I think that all of that applies to all theories, including those in the sciences, as much as it applies to maps.
One way to think of what I want to say is that healthy and beneficial use of theories includes understanding what they’re designed to do, and awareness of their limitations. Some examples of what theories in the sciences are designed to do are to facilitate research, communication about research, and development of technology. I’ll discuss their limitations in another post.