Quote:
Originally Posted by noise
A challenge
If you read this whole thing, then bravo. Now how will you reply? It's easy - prove me wrong.
Tell me something objectively true about a thing in the world. Something that is true no matter what. Something that:
1. Is not relative to the human condition (that is, it's true whether we exist or not),
2. and is not expressed metaphorically
go!
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The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458m/s
The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299 792 458 of a second
How do the above stack up? Certainly, the units of measurement may be man made, but the phenomenon they describe are very real. The planets will continue to orbit the sun whether we're here to observe them or not, for instance.
You seem to be attributing "sentences" to science that science would not use to describe the world. Sure, a scientist may state that something is hot or cold, but in the course of their experiments, if the temperature of an object were important to said experiment, it would be measured and not simply described. Your argument seems to boil down to the fact that humans use words to describe things in terms other humans can understand.
In your example of a dog being behind a tree, it is objectively true that, from the frame of reference of the observer, the dog is behind the tree. A third party could observe this by creating a coordinate system and plotting the positions of the relevant objects. Just because we describe things in terms relative to our own experience, this in no way inhibits the possibility to "describe" things in absolute terms. In fact, describing things in absolute terms is the very nature of science.