Written on November 2, 2024

The modern idea of science comes from the philosophy of empiricism. Empiricism is an epistemological philosophy that states that true knowledge comes only or mainly from sensory experience and empirical evidence.

Science is the logical continuation of this, namely putting this philosophy into practice. Collecting empirical data, in order to be able to draw objective facts from it.

But are there objective facts? Can we draw conclusions objectively? Even when working with objective empirical data?

My first example. Empirical data shows that the amount of agricultural pesticides in our food and drink is so small that, as far as we know, they are of little or no harm.

However, this does not take into account the fact that people nowadays eat and drink many different types of agricultural pesticides simultaneously. And unfortunately, the damage from the combination of these toxins appears to be worse than we thought.

Factually, it is true that the amount of agricultural pesticides in our food and drink is so small that, as far as we know, they are of little or no harm. But when you look at the whole picture, the truth appears to be different.

In this way, empirical data can be misused to draw conclusions that may not be true at all, despite the fact that the numbers used to draw this conclusion are objectively true.

My second example. You are presented with a study that seems to show that sugar is less unhealthy than you previously thought. If you look at the numbers, this does indeed seem to be true.

In this large-scale scientific study, the health of people who ate a fixed amount of sugar per day was monitored over a long period of time. But what the study didn't say is that the group of people whose health was monitored exercised disproportionately often.

Factually, what the study presents is correct, but it ignores the fact that the average person lives less healthily than the people in the study, which obviously has a major impact on the outcome of the study. In this way, the conclusion drawn is still a lie, even though the empirical data is factually correct.

With this in mind, we find ourselves on thin ice in a world where governments almost always place the responsibility for investigating whether food, drink and pesticides are healthy enough to use in the hands of the manufacturers who sell them.