KingDingledork

Don't call me son because back when you were still crapping yellow baby shit in your diapers, I was experimenting with marijuana out in the field.

How do you know cannabis molecules actually exist since you can't see them with your eyes? Or do you have some sort of X-ray vision which will one day, no doubt, be used for Evil?

No problem when it's for "science" as if science was a thing-in-itself. Science is just fancy word for "I have a bigshot degree and what I think matters." People use that word wayyyy too liberally these days.

If you use data collection methods which depend upon verbal skills, then you AREN'T DOING SCIENCE!

Language is NOT a transparent medium through which you can view the world.

Language has its own rules (grammars) which inject structures and strictures into itself. And if your subject/survey taker/participant replies using the same grammars you used to ask the question, this just multiplies the error you started out with. These small yet prevalent errors or failures of representation invite a crisis of meaning later on when initial foundations are exposed as unstable or in flux.

If you're studying people though language, you may be doing important linguistics or awesome opinion-taking but it does not count as science in the objectivist/positivistic paradigm underpinning the physical sciences. It is another domain of knowledge altogether.

Finally all you can ever do is observe the phenomenon as it appears to you. You can never know the reality underpinning that phenomenon. Even the physical sciences are called into question with this last objection.

So are you really a scientist?