Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
There are some nuances that you are missing. Scientific theories are utter crap when they are illogical and (therefore) unexplanatory, such as the theory that “life evolved”, basically claiming that something comes from nothing. This is utter crap. Theories that don’t commit such fallacies are usually good enough as far as they go.
But folklore represents the memory of people. Universal tales represent the memory of humanity. You trust your own memory, don’t you? Why not treat other people’s memory with equal respect?
Actually, I don’t think you went from fallible details to any sort of “broader set” when you mention continuity of humanity biologically. It’s the same set of findings all along, subject to whichever speculation is currently imagined to best account for them.
Do you mean there’s been no evolution in human species, so that whenever we term someone “human”, the being must, by definition, live roughly a hundred years or less, not more? Is this theory of non-evolution really the current scientific consensus? But if you hold to the theory of evolution, doesn’t this sort of mean that the current human species were at an earlier time effectively another species with other characteristics? is determined by I know that Darwin understood how his Origin of Species actually rendered the term “species” null and void, and he was a bit sorry for that.
Isn’t it true that when scientists set out to determine the age of the ancient person whose remains have been found, they consider the way humans age here and now, completely disregarding any theory of evolution and the state of the species at ancient times? Naturally, this kind of science inevitably “works” because of the unprincipled way it is applied.
Depends on what you mean by science. If science equals physics/biology and this further equals “all reality”, without any chance of sociology and psychology, then yes, I will continue come across as dismissive of such science.
I think it is helpful to consider some parts of the Bible to be folklore — the folklore of the ancient Israelites — as well as their poetry, their political propaganda, and their spirituality.
I’m not a specialist in folklore — or in anything, really — but it strikes me that it is one thing to say that much folklore has some basis in reality and quite another thing to say that any folklore is an accurate description of what really happened. For reasons that escape me, Erik seems to be asserting the latter but really arguing for the former.
That much folklore has some basis in reality seems fairly unobjectionable; that any folklore is an accurate description of reality seems fairly absurd.
Of course we have nothing other than our own grasp of reality in order to make either claim.
At times Erik seems to have said that the writers of Scripture understood themselves to be describing real events. But if this is indeed what he said, I think he has missed his own best insight: that the genre of the Hebrew Bible predates our modern distinction between descriptions and non-descriptions (allegories, parables, metaphors, etc.).
We have to choose whether to read it descriptively or non-descriptively, because Scripture itself does not tell us how it should be read.
The situation is a bit different, I think, for the New Testament, because the Gospels and Paul’s letters were all written from a standpoint of consciousness much closer to our own: they were all written after the critique of myth that runs from Xenophon and Parmenides through Plato and Aristotle to Epicurus and Epictetus.
When Paul writes that the Gospel seemed like foolishness to the Greeks, he is saying that it seemed like foolishness to the best philosophers he knew of. There’s pretty good textual evidence that Paul knew some Greek and Roman philosophy, and it’s there in the Gospels as well.
I confess I do not understand why anyone would read either the Old or New Testaments descriptively. When I’m talking with someone and it comes up that they read the Bible as a fully accurate description of empirical reality, I don’t know how to continue the conversation. I feel as though I’ve gone from conversationalist to anthropologist.
The important point, IMHO, is that non-literal understandings are parasitic on literal ones. In a sense, what that means is that (to put it mysteriously). Truth has to reign.
I think Fifth and Mung get that, but Erik doesn’t, which I take to be a significant part of the reason behind all the ‘post-structuralist” weaselling.
As to making fun. For me, it’s part of the enjoyment of these discussions. And, as said, I’d be gentler, if Erik wasn’t so disdainful of all opposing views himself. You and KN treat him a little like a helpless toddler who need protection from all the meanies here.. Not sure that’s really so respectful myself. BWTHDIK?
They can and do. This is what differentiates mere stories from invariants, types, and universals.
I don’t know what you mean by the “same set of findings”. Science is a set of practices, as we discussed earlier in the thread, and some of the conclusions of those practices are more provisional than others. The practices themselves make that distinction on the level of provisionality (if that is a word). Future work does sometimes overturn that consensus. But the practices are the best we have in the domains of knowledge where science applies. Hence the reasonable approach is to rely on consensus conclusions resulting from full application of the practices.
I don’t think you understand evolution the way science depicts it. But there are many books that explain evolution better than I can.
Physics/biology is not what I mean by science. I use a broad definition of science that includes anything that can be studied using the practices which we exchanged notes on much earlier in this thread. I do think those practices involve both reason and experiment, and much more, and that how those practices are applied in a specific science is determined and is developed by the relevant scientific community.
So I would certainly include psychology, and I would also say history and anthropology, if done according to scientific practices.
On the other hand, aesthetics, ethics, spiritual study, and others, can yield non-scientific knowledge, I think. But my suspicion is that is not a popular viewpoint at TSZ.
Erik,
That is false. I have addressed both the science and the
universalitycommonness of the story. It is convenient to pretend I have only ever made one general kind of observation. I don’t consider the stories to be compelling evidence of actuality. Are they more common around the Pacific Rim? Can we be sure that the tellers of the tales had no contact with Christian missionaries? Why do we accept this story from their mythos and not everything else? I suspect confirmation bias. But back to science – if all peoples descended from eight partially-related individuals, there should be a genetic signal of this. There is not. Same for the animals.I don’t see how that follows at all, in either case.
Therefore everything we currently know is wrong? I find this line of reasoning unconvincing.
Why should I trust a story as an accurate guide to senses of the people in it? I don’t even know if they existed, let alone had senses! I am not trusting my senses when I assert that a column of steam equivalent to 8km of water had this pressure, would produce that amount of energy on condensation, or that amount of energy on tumbling to earth, cause this amount of decompression …
Given that we know the size of the globe and the properties of water, we can make reasonable inferences about the traces we might expect to find. You even make some half-hearted attempts to provide naturalistic explanations yourself – ice dams, vapour canopies – though you soon dismiss naturalistic approaches when the going gets tough. Nonetheless, a major historic event should leave actual traces, no?
Now that is an interesting comment.
But isn’t context (ie pragmatics) the first consideration when analysing an utterance, eg a text? So if the context was taken as a mythical story aimed to convey a cultural “truth”, wouldn’t that have to be taken into account before analysing meaning and then determining truth?
I’d personally prefer “having” to “making”. Sometimes that “having fun” includes subtle humor (often too subtle by half I am afraid). But that is just me.
Now we are back to Gandhi and his famous misquote about being the change you want to see.
Pragmatics is ‘first’ in the coming to understand only. It’s how we know. But wrt WHAT is known reference and (Tarskian) truth are prior. In order for truth and reference tpo be fiddled with, first there must BE truth and reference.
That’s my (non-Wittgensteinian) take on this matter, at any rate. For ‘Slab!’ to mean “Bring me that rock!” language must be referential or intentional. This is so even if a better translation is “Man, do you smell!”. But yes, we have to study the behaviors to get to the meanings.
Re Gandhi, as mentioned before, I’m more of a Tagore guy. I don’t think he was averse to occasional ridicule. And I am soooo gentle!
If you were a specialist, you would know how the genres run. In folkloristics, myth is another category than legend. A legend may be derived from or related to religion (say, a dragon-slaying saint) but a myth is central to religion, irreducible. And a myth that is a textual universal (e.g. flood and creation stories) are still another category.
And this is folkloristics where scripture is not considered a distinct genre. I see now that our discussion will never get around to actual scripture.
No, we don’t have to choose. Just like somebody above said “false dichotomy!” when I set forth the choice of taking the flood story seriously or calling our ancestors liars, I say it’s a false dichotomy to try to figure out if to read it “descriptively” or “non-descriptively”.
What is a “non-descriptive” story anyway? Post-enlightenment historians ceased believing in Iliad, but archeology ended up confirming it. So, was Iliad non-descriptive, but suddenly became descriptive upon archeological findings? False dichotomy, I say. Modern science is full of false principles like this.
No. What I’m saying is that therefore you cannot tell if they know or not. They keep changing their minds. You take it as a sign of intellectual bankruptcy when a believer changes his/her mind or is self-contradictory, right? Why not treat scientists with the same standard? I smell a confirmation bias here.
How do you define true versus false in terms of scientific practices? I suspect this doesn’t go under reason or experiment, but under “much more”. So our difference lies either in the area of “much more” or…
…the difference lies in how we treat “non-scientific knowledge”. The way you describe it here implies that you mean philosophical knowledge, which I regard much higher than scientific knowledge, because philosophy is logically prior to (empirical) science.
KN said:
I guess that depends on what you conceptualize “reality” to be. If you’re committed to scientific-type descriptions as being “of reality” by a priori definition, then of course folklore and scripture “do not accurately describe reality”.
It may be, however, that some or much of reality is not accurately describable via scientific language.
In fact, KN, I think your “scientific description of reality” a priori is an oppressive attitude, and commits violence on those who consider reality to be better described via other frameworks.
It’s funny how those “better frameworks” are so unproductive. Given that, in what sense are they “better”?
OMagain said:
First, I didn’t say they were “better”. I said others might consider them better. Different kinds of descriptions might simply describe (to varying degrees of success) different aspects of whatever reality is and our existence in it.
Second, it depends on how you frame the concept of “unproductive”. I suggest you’re probably framing the idea of “productivity” as tautologically related to what science produces and considers to be “productive”. Which means you’re just being circular wrt your a prioris.
Of course it is. That’s because your idea of evolution is complete bullshit, having nothing to do with its basis in real processes whose effects happen to be seen in DNA and in the fossil record.
It wouldn’t hurt for you to learn a bit about what you criticize.
Glen Davidson
Heh.
In what sense are you using it then?
Like learning the fact that under the title On the Origin of Species Darwin did away with any notion of species, fuelling debate around the species problem. He said that “species” was an entirely arbitrary term, a matter of convenience.
I don’t think I was even criticising this. I was simply reporting it as it is, along with the fact that this kind of thinking doesn’t work in humanities.
Oh, and why do you think that? Because you don’t understand science?
Do you actually think that Hutton and Lyell worked on geology in order to provide oil and gold to the masses? Or did they just want to use the sort of epistemology that worked elsewhere in order to understand the earth? But then how can you be sure that this sort of scientific framework really works? That’s right, if it helps us to find oil and gold, this being a more or less independent test to see if the overall approach is sound (yes I know that much geological work has been done in order to find oil–but the science is done fairly independently of just “did we find oil?”).
Yes, I’m not surprised that you conflate the economically productive results with the goals of the science, but there is considerable independence of science from its economic impact–or science wouldn’t work. It would instead just be a matter of hunches. Those can work as well (and may be passed down by mentors), but they don’t make science as such.
Glen Davidson
Wow, non sequitur to the hilt. It’s your thinking that fails the worst, as you simply move goalposts and make up strawmen to attack, rather than to, say, think about matters.
But on to your next ill-considered and incorrect claim. Here’s Darwin in Origin (not sure which edition, but as none was specified…):
Well, what do you know, he believed that species come to be tolerably well-defined objects, even if he didn’t have good criteria for determining what they are.
No, you were writing about something completely different, and making a different mistake. Why do you have such a hard time keeping to the point, let alone getting anything right?
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson said:
I think that spiritual and religious people think of productivity in terms that are dissimilar to scientific thinking. Do you disagree?
Not sure what nerve I touched here, or what it is you are assuming about what I meant. Scientific investigations and knowledge work a certain way. “Productivity” translates into methods and activities that are pretty much universally applicable at least in a statistically significant sense. That’s one definition of productive. This concept may not include all or even most of what exists in reality.
Except I didn’t conflate nor did I even mention “economically productive results”; for some bizarre reason you just assumed that is what I meant.
Is it really that difficult to understand why that’s a reasonable conclusion, give you just said:
Anyway, given there are (say) two ways of describing reality, you are saying one is potentially better then the other. In what sense are you using the word “better”?
Of course I disagree, since most religious/spiritual people at least value what comes from science, and more science-oriented people often have non-scientific goals similar to those of religious people (or, indeed, they may be religious people).
Gee, or it may. If you have some “objective” means of deciding which is correct, bring it on. Otherwise, why bring up idle speculation as if it were cogent?
No, it was because I had mentioned economic results earlier in the thread, and took OMagain’s comment to continue on that theme (I did wonder if I should, but context seemed to support it, so I did). To be sure, it may not have been meant as a continuation, however anyone following the thread could reasonably assume that it did continue the theme. You didn’t bother answering in context, what a shock. Your fault, but I have reason to at least pretend that you answer in context (as if you respond in good faith, that is), although I know how poor your responses typically are, so am not surprised that you just meant what you meant, who cares about what had already been written?
Glen Davidson
Probably because you said I got something wrong, but you didn’t say what it was. Hard to guess when you don’t specify. I think there are things wrong with Darwin and I actually say what they are. Even though Darwin is not the point here, so that’s it about him.
Of course I referred to what it was and responded to it, this being the mindless claim that evolution is about something coming from nothing. That is creationism, not evolution with its documented processes.
Or when you don’t understand the subject at all well.
Yes, that Darwin is not the point is yet another gross failure on your part. I was writing about evolution, not the historic viewpoint of Darwin.
Glen Davidson
It’s not reasonable. It’s a complete non-sequitur.
There may be multiple ways of describing aspects of reality for various purposes that are productive within those frames of reference. You (and others here) are the ones insisting (apparently) that there is only one viable concept of reality and only one valid method of determinnig how “productive” any description is because you compare that description against your particular concept of reality.
GlenDavidson said;
“Answer in context”??? I wasn’t responding to you, Glen – I was responding to something KN said and I quoted him and attributed it to him. Then OMagain asked me a question, and I responded him, quoting him and attributing the quote to him. I wasn’t talking to you or responding to you or “answering” anything you said.
I see. But I was referencing the theory that “life evolved”, which I meant as a claim for origin of life. Abiogenesis, not evolution. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clear this up.
GlenDavidson said:
Some or most of reality may not be describable (at least not accurately) via “objectively verifiable” forms of narrative. It may be like demanding, ‘Which one is a better description – wave or particle?” It may depend on the circumstances and what kind of framework one is working from.
Oh I see, you don’t understand what “context” means. I was pointing out that there was context to the responses, and you just bleat that you weren’t responding to me, as if that were a sequitur. Context, not text. Try to understand.
Uh huh, did these occur in a context?
Well, I probably would have referred to text (comment, etc.) rather than context if I was concerned about you responding to me. Too tough for you to follow?
Glen Davidson
Well that does make a difference, although the point of abiogenesis experiments is to see if something from something is viable for life coming from non-life. If we’re not there now, that doesn’t mean that anyone is actually satisfied with something coming from “nothing.”
Glen Davidson
Each option there has specific uses. And both waves and particles are really inside the same system, so it’s not really a good example.
Perhaps give a couple of example frameworks, explain the circumstances that relate to choosing one framework over another and why?
As the actual example you’ve given (wave or particle) actually undermines the point you are making. There is a single framework in which both of those are available, they are not separate.
I can think of a couple of examples myself, but I’m interested to see what you have to say, or if you will just back off with your “I’m not saying this, people are” clause?
I wish we would. That’s what I’m here for, anyway.
It’s a false dichotomy for us to attribute to the writers of those texts an intent to write descriptively or non-descriptively, but I don’t see how we can avoid reading these texts through that lens. Our modernity is us. In that sense the “true meaning” of the text is unknowable to us, because we can only suspend our prejudices partially and provisionally at best.
I’d say that the Iliad was based on myths and legends transmitted over generations in an oral culture that turned out to have a stronger basis in fact than had been previously supposed. That doesn’t mean that the Iliad contains any correct descriptions of what Achilles or Hector did. At most the archaeology should bolster our confidence that there probably were real warriors whose actions inspired the legends of Achilles and Hector.
I have witnessed legends born in my lifetime. I have seen [trivial] things that I witnessed warped by news reporting. I have seen major events that I lived through stripped of the meaning they had at the time and re-robed in hindsight.
I don’t know how to get around this, because I suspect the plural of journalistic accounts is not data.
Trivial example: how will anyone in the future ever be able to see Bill Cosby as the people of my generation saw him?
Just glanced through the recent comments and Erik’s reference to the Iliad had my jaw dropping but I see KN has already picked up on it.
That is some incredibly black-and-white thinking from Erik. Events described in The Iliad are either all truth or all lies? Is there no room for embellishment? Exaggeration? Poetic licence? Seems that story-telling, where gaps in knowledge about the facts can be improved with a little imagination, is a universal ability in human beings. Leads me to imagine why people had large brains millennia before we became “civilized”.
ETA “as” to “are” to “is”
GlenDavidson said:
You make some erroneous assumption and come flying off at me when I hadn’t referred to you or anything you wrote at all, and somehow it’s my fault?
ROFL.
OMagain said:
That they are both scientific descriptions is irrelevant. The example shows that apparently contradictory descriptions can both be useful (productive), even if we don’t understand how those apparently contradictory descriptions can be reconciled.
I’m with you on this point, although our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality can surely be informed by biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and so forth.
The more difficult question is whether it is good or valuable that our understanding of values — aesthetic, ethical, and religious values — be informed by the sciences of human nature. But I do think that it should be, because it is through careful examination of the consequences of experimentation that we can determine which of our hypotheses are reliable guides to future inquiry and which are not.
Although I share BruceS’s thought that there is non-scientific knowledge (though both the “non-scientific” and the “knowledge” would need to be explicated extremely carefully), I bristle at the suggestion that
I do not think that philosophy is “higher” than science, because I do not think that philosophy is logically prior to empirical science.
I say that because the concept of logical priority makes good sense when we are examining the relationship of premises to conclusions. But I do not think that the relationship between non-scientific knowledge and scientific knowledge is that of premise to conclusion. And if it is not that of premise to conclusion, then the idea of “logical priority” makes no sense.
Rather we have developed, and will continue to develop, many different ways of making sense of experience. Some of those ways involve rigorous testing of hypotheses and many of them do not.
In some cases there is an evident clash between the hypotheses that have been refined through successive iterations of rigorous testing and the convictions that have the force of authority and tradition. But in most other cases we can compartmentalize more-or-less nicely, though at the (modest? steep?) price of inconsistency.
deja vu
When I point out that two of your statements are in conflict you get all huffy and accuse me of quote-mining. Do you want me to apologize for pointing out that you were contradicting yourself?
Are you sure you want to get into the use of numbers in Scripture?
Oh, ha ha ha, you’re so clever. Resort to the usual vague BS that you typically use as a get out of jail free card, ignore the context, and then chortle because you’re too dim to understand what context is about–plus you don’t care.
So laugh it up, and try to pretend that it’s justified. It’s the UD way.
Glen Davidson
Then why do people keep asking how how many survivors there were?
Yup. It never occurred to Jews or Muslims or Anti-Christ-ians that it could be anything else.
Since you have neither supported this claim nor retracted it, I don’t see why anyone else needs to conform to your rules for proper skepticism.
First let me get the spelling of “hermeneutically” right two or three times in a row, then we can start with numerology.
http://batlyrics.net/four_is_a_magic_number-lyrics-loudon_wainwright_iii.html
Coming from the foremost scholar in ancient Hebrew texts in our midst, I say we should take heed.
My comment was meant to motivate KN to explicate his own black-and-white and ad-hoc “descriptive” versus “non-descriptive” distinction. Outsiders like you misread too easily.
Our paradigm largely determines how we view things, yes, but as soon as we understand that it’s a paradigm among other paradigms, we can, with some effort, select paradigms at will and even devise more of them as suits our purposes. This is the difference between layman and expert.
Well, but it contains descriptions of what Achilles or Hector did, so it’s not “non-descriptive”. Or is it now about “correct descriptions”? “Correct” in what sense? Looks like you are trying your level best to presuppose the conclusion that the text is “not correct”. It is much more sensible to acknowledge that myth is a synthetic genre.
So, in your opinion when you conduct empirical studies, you don’t presuppose anything, not even empiricism (i.e. that the senses can be trusted)? Or when you presuppose empiricism, the presupposition is best forgotten, best not to examine it lest you discover how you presuppose your conclusions and this distract you from your empirical study towards some logical coherence?
…whereas it has never ever been the case that a hypothesis refined through successive iterations of rigorous testing cannot be accepted based on simple logic (distinct from authority and tradition)? For example there’s nothing in tradition or authority that would require rejection of phrenology or the mind-brain identity theory. It’s just that they don’t stand up to logical scrutiny. Your failure to recognise the logical priority of philosophy over empirical science is in the same category.
Erik,
Absolutely not. Stop putting words in my mouth. The ability to recognise and admit prior error is a positive one. Identification and correction of self-contradictory models is the stuff of science. But that does not mean perpetual flux. You think I should chastise scientists for not being like a dogmatic religionist who will not drop a historic reading no matter what?
“Isaiah 40:22: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in”
Do you think we should only provisionally accept the scientific view that the earth is not a circle (ie flat) given the contradiction of this passage? There are many who will not yield even this to science, and one could while away many an hour trying to persuade them otherwise. If there is a contradiction between a reading and science, then so much the worse for science. After all, it is (sometimes) wrong. But the Bible? Nevah!
Why didn’t you think about it when you did the same thing to me?
It would also be a good idea to stop insisting that the Bible teaches flat earth when it doesn’t.
For me, it is important to start with with scientific knowledge as developed by the scientific community and what is reasonable to believe based on that. The status (that is, how provisional it is) of that knowledge is a scientific issue.
ETA: “Knowledge” may have been a poor choice of word, since it is often taken to be Justified True Belief, and I wanted to exclude “truth”. So a better approach might be to start by saying the level of justification is an output of the ongoing practices of the relevant scientific community.
I agree that defining “truth” for science is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. As of today, I find most convincing the philosophical position that the theories of a mature science, taken descriptively, make true statements about structures in the world. True in the sense of modelling how things are.
My suspicion is your position differs. But I am not sure how exactly. I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether your posts are referring to a descriptive interpretation or a non-descriptive one. (As for example, when you explained why people lived longer before the flood by referring to solar radiation and also saying the text writers knew how to make stories consistent).
On the primacy of philosophy over science: I see science and philosophy being continuous. I take this issue as related to your previous discussions with KN on rationalism versus empiricism. I will not attempt to participate in that fray.
Where “science” and “scientific” means “physics” and “physical”, right? Because I don’t see you taking folklorists seriously on folkloristic matters or theologians on theological matters. You judge everything from the angle of physics and physicists. You have a preconceived notion about what science is. Have you given it a thought how you ended up this way?
My position differs in what we take “mature science” to be. I agree that scientists aim to “descriptively” model how things are, but they confuse the description with reality often enough, particularly physicists these days. They occasionally think they have refuted laws of logic, which decisively shows that they relentlessly conflate description with reality.
On the other hand, in linguistics and philology it’s a standard thesis that any event has a potentially infinite number of possible descriptions – and they can all be “true” descriptions. The thesis is easily testable: Think of a dog. Now think of the word “dog”. Now think of the French word for dog. And German, Persian, etc. Infinite ways to say “dog”. This is so not only on the vocabulary level, but on semantic level too. (This doesn’t mean that falsity doesn’t exist. I’m simply skipping that part for now.)
You take physicists seriously. I take linguists seriously. This is where we differ.
No, as I detailed in my previous posts, I do not take science to be limited to physics. I realize, however, that you are replying to many posters here and that it is easy to confuse what each believes.
Perhaps you mean to refer to the fact that I am a physicalist. You never asked exactly that what means to me. Good thing that, for me, because it is pretty tricky to explain it while avoiding the pitfalls that you have mentioned which come from realizing science is always provisional. I cannot add to the SEP discussion I linked.
I agree many scientists fail when they venture into philosophy. That does not change the value of their scientific work, however.
I don’t know what practices folklorists or linguistics follow, but if they are scientific, then I would consider them sciences. Those practices include reason, proper incorporation of empirical evidence, experimentation as possible to test theories, transparency, peer review, development of scientific expertise as practiced in the community, assessing theories based on standards of the scientific community, and so on.
I don’t think scientific theories can be non-physicalist, however.
I think the descriptions of reality from different sciences each tell us something valuable and important about reality.
ETA: Philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, spiritual study, can tell us important things about the aspects of human reality that science does not address (but I do think work in these areas should be informed by relevant science).