[ 31/March/22 Walter Smith in Foundations of Logic asked:
Choose 1 or 2 or 3:
1.Everything that is not part of sciences is based on fiction
or
2.Everything that is not based on sciences is fiction
or
3.?]
3
Science is a process, of hypothesis generation, test design, testing, analysis; that eliminates those hypotheses that do not fit the datasets available.
As such, science does not ever prove anything right, but is an eternal and iterative process of becoming “less wrong” over time.
Another process of becoming less wrong is Darwinian selection. One possible instantiation of Darwinian selection is essentially the random generation of stories, then seeing which of the populations using those stories survive over the long term. Such a process also tends to become less wrong over time, but much more slowly than the process of science.
Any set of stories (understandings) that has survived over the long term must (by this Darwinian definition) be a sufficiently useful approximation to reality at some scale and set of contexts that it is able to survive in those contexts.
Fiction is a story that at some level or in some aspects is demonstrably not related to reality.
Some fictions are so simply because names of places and people have been changed, but all other aspects are otherwise very close approximations to some set of events.
Other fictions are so because some author has explored some set of themes or strategies or ideas in some set of contexts that have not been observed as such in reality.
Then there is the idea that there might exist logics with greater sets of truth values than 2 (True/False). The next simplest being a trinary (True/False/Undecided). It does seem possible that we live in a reality that allows for infinite sets of possible truth values, that do in some contexts (at some scales) very closely approximate the asymptotes of (True/False).
So it seems to be deeply more complex that a simple “science” or “fiction” distinction might be seen to imply.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 