Science/Knowledge; Good or Bad for Earth?

Science is knowledge. Badly applied science is destructive.

Science enabled the population to expand beyond a billion people, create nuclear weapons, global warming, modern militaries, defoliation, pcbs, Auschwitz, the Interstate highway system, three billion cows, high Arctic pollution, industrial disease, microwave weapons, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein...

Painting humanity into an existential-environmental corner is largely the application of science to technology and mass production. One can imagine a humanity that evolved differently as intelligent beings bright enough to start with to not conflict with the environment much while yet inventing new constructions. A zero net loss of biospheric health principle is still fundamental and an inference one must make with all applications of science to the world-sphere-ecology.

Science' has a meaning, strictly; 'knowledge'. Science is a word-meaning unit obviously. One must start somewhere epistemologically speaking. Perhaps you can evolve your communication beyond pettyfoggery. The etymology of the word science is 'knowledge'. That's a definition not a tautology, and the issue of 'is science good for the planet', is not fundamentally a linguistic issue.

Popper wrote that 'rationality can't be proved-that you just know what it is'. Thats a point worth recollecting when denying the validity of basic points of communication.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_etymology_the_word_science

Knowledge is something a human has or does with their brain. Science is not an reflexive behavior such as coyotes do when running under the moonlight in arroyos howling for happiness.

example A of 'Scientific progress does not make the world a better place...

example A; Humans with knowledge can apply it or not. A genius might know how to turn the Pacific Ocean into concrete with some special additive, yet it would be harmful if the knowledge(science) were applied in such a way.

example B: Tilly knows through research how to prevent birth defects. Tilly applies the knowledge and halts all birth defects and makes all voters Republicans, therefor the world is a better place.

One may discern that the application of science can be good or bad, and that too is knowledge as wisdom.

One can readily make categorical confusions or errors in language. Science means knowledge as an historical use of the term. Obviously linguistic philosophical descriptions of the meaning of words is a field for itself. One may readily circumlocute away from reasonably simply empirical concerns into intentional concepts.


It is fair enough to rephrase propositions in order to better answer them.

Substituting 'science' with 'knowledge' we may put the statement of this thread as 'Knowledge progress does not make the world a better place'.

There-we have achieved our point from which to make scathing jokes and reposts such as with the further reductio and contrapositive'Advancing ignorance makes the world a better place'.

Then we may thus generate aphorisms such as 'ignorance must make the world a better place because it is incapable of recognizing anything wrong'.

Discretion in applying knowledge however so technical it may be is the beneficial wit of science.

On the point that knowledge depends on what one does with it--I do not agree. Knowledge is self-standing so far as thought is locally independent in space-time continua in human sentience.

On the further point clarified, that what one does with knowledge is trivial-that is absurd. What one does is the essential variable in the world being made 'better' or not by knowledge/science.

It would be useful to define a list of things that would make the world better if they were made to occur by an application of knowledge/science. Relocating the planet to a better neighborhood in the galaxy with more earth-like planets might make the world better yet that is not within the knowledge base of scientific method right now.

The first rule of medicine in treating a patient is 'don't make the condition worse'. Mindless economic applications of knowledge/science discoveries would certainly fail consequentialist varieties of utilitarian philosophy. Act and rule based utilitarianism applied to science-knowledge a priori in order to determine the effects on the world for good or bad often are not made at all politically or individually. Historically the fundamental criteria for scientific applications are fiduciary and that state certainly is prevalent today.

On the question of is science more efficient or knowledge acquisition more efficient if the methods cohere within a bureaucracy, and do bureaucratic scientific procedures make the world a better place (accomplish goals on the list of things to do that make the world a better place) perhaps versus individualistic scientific efforts, perhaps that is a trivial question if there are no objective parameters for describing making the world better.

It is plain though that scientific applications ares the basic parameter for determining if science a good or bad effect upon world improvement.