should just accept them as true and continue to learn them, as I generally find them interesting no mat-
ter what.
In reading Chris' thoughts on scientific reasoning here, I began to realize that with each thing that
we are able to prove wrong, we come that much closer to proving what is right. It made me realize that
in learning the latest theories about things, even if they might someday come to be wrong, maybe
because my Psychology class learned about the current theories of today, one of us could be the one to
arrive at the current theory of tomorrow. It all began to make just a little bit more sense to me and I
think from now on will give me a much more optimistic answer if those same questions happen to pop
into my head again.
Student 2:
Student 1's thoughts are exactly what I spend way too much of my day thinking about:How are we
to know that our current thoughts and paradigms are right? Why have we gotten into a mode where we
accept things as "law," as Student 1 points out? I think that having knowledge accepted as law is much
more emotionally safe for us than uncertainty. We would have a hard time with the notion that maybe
the world isn't round, although that may be a bad example. Take for example any BIG theory that we
hold as truth right now. As Student 1 asks, are people going to be laughing at us in 100 years? Probably.
And that's why psychologists and scientists on the whole are doing what they do best:Questioning. They
are asking why, finding evidence to the contrary and exploring the world in which we live. I would even
go so far as to say that they are in fact indirectly responsible for our emotional stability and feeling of
safety.
Student 3:
I definitely agree that it's frightening to imagine people looking back at our "modern" ideas and view-
ing them as practically infantile, but I also feel like there's a different way of looking at all this (not a
better way, just a different one). Student 2 and Student 1 talk about emotional stability that comes with
facts and certainties, but what about the point of all these discoveries? If in ten years we discover that
there is an infinitely better way to cure cancer - as opposed to methods such as chemotherapy - WE
won't feel foolish. It is possible that a HUNDRED years down the road,people will look back on us as
somewhat foolish, but they simply won't understand what it was like to live in our times, and to have
access to so much less information than they do. But at the time of the new discovery, we'll know that,
ten years earlier, we were using maybe not the best method,but one that was much better than nothing
at all. We were still saving actual lives, whether or not people at large could find emotional stability in
considering the cure to be the "right one." People could spend a lot of time hemming and hawing each
time new discoveries are made, wondering if in the future the new facts will still hold true, but our lives
would be much more difficult for it. I'm actually not really contradicting Lauren and Eliot at all, just
putting a bit of a different perspective on it: when you look at scientific "truths" in light of something
like saving lives, you see another motive for believing in modern science, besides emotional stability.
Student 4:
I find the idea that it is virtually impossible to prove anything to be very counterintuitive and frankly a
little frightening. We rely so much every day on facts which we assume to be true which, if they sudden-
ly turned out to be false, could potentially destroy our deceivingly real feeling of understanding about
the world.It is strange how these "facts" are not "facts"at all, but rather all probabilities of varying cer-
tainty. It seems that,in the scientific world,one cannot be one hundred percent certain of anything unless
one assumes some prior condition; this lack of certainty amidst the authority that the world of science
commands to the general public is surprising to say the least. People trust most things that they hear
from the wonderful world of "science" when perhaps they shouldn't. In addition,the problem posed by
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