vanceen said:
The assumptions underlying the scientific method are the same ones that underly the basic understanding of the real world.
I don't think so. The advent of science in western civilization has altered our "commonsense" understanding of the world. Our understanding of the world now is constructed, it's not something with which we're just born.
vanceen said:
All we truly experience are perceptions fed to our brains, and any sense we make of those perceptions is a set of models in our brains about how those perceptions fit together. Through consistency, repeatibility, and coherence we make conclusions that certain phenomena are real, and that certain principles will pertain independent of our preferences and mindset. If you kick a rock with your bare foot, you hurt your foot every time.
There are some of those assumptions I was talking about. Why does consistency have anything to do with truth? Why does pain, or sensation, have anything to do with truth? Weren't you just saying that the only thing we experience are perceptions? If truth depends on consistent experience, and what we experience (consistently or otherwise) is only perception, then truth depends on perception.
vanceen said:
The scientific method (and yes, the method is science) formalizes our instinctive model making.
That just seems patently false. The model-making we employ "instinctively" is probably impossible to isolate, since we are acculturated nearly from the moment we're born. There are two versions of an argument that can be made here; I'll make the weaker one. It seems quite clear that any study of civilizations and cultures other than modern western culture shows that instinctive human model-making isn't very much like scientific model-making at all. Science is a very localized affair, comparatively-speaking.
vanceen said:
The most distinctive aspect of science, and the reason it has been so fantastically successful in changing our world, is that it insists that both empiricism and rationalism (the old philosophic enemies) be brought into the process. Speculating about mechanisms (i.e. model building) is not to be trusted on its own; hypotheses have to be falsifiable and tested by observations.
Well, I do agree that science combines rational and empirical methods. I also agree that science relies on testing.
vanceen said:
I don't know why you would claim that assumptions can't be corrected by empirical observations.
Well, let me try to be a little more clear. I didn't say that no asumptions can be corrected by empirical methods. I said that
those assumptions, referring to a set of assumptions, cannot be corrected by the empirical method. Specifically, I'm referring to a semi-dynamic set of assumptions that include basic concepts like how we carve up the world (like how we tend not to think of mereological sums as objects), plus more sophisticated assumptions like ones about the value of observation, plus at least one more group (see below). These, it doesn't seem, are susceptible to empirical ratification. No observation can tell you that you didn't just observe a rabbit, but rather, undisconnected animated rabbit-parts. Similarly, no observation can tell you that observations convey trustworthy information, or that theories with fewer ontological posits are preferable, or what-have-you. Some assumptions that fall in these subsets are fairly innocuous. Others are massively consequential.
The third group, however, is more interesting, and it's a dynamic subset of the larger set. While any individual member of this subset can be rejected by observation, the process of doing so involves two unique features. First, the assumption can always be saved by changing what we take to be true, and second, at least one other unsupported assumption appears to take its place if it is rejected. This is just standard indeterminacy: for any theory T, there is another theory T' that explains the evidence just as well, but with different ontological posits and also possibly different relations.
vanceen said:
Claiming science isn't about discovering truth just doesnt work without some special definition of science, or some special definition of truth. If progress in science isn't progress toward truth, then there is no such thing as progress toward truth.
I disagree, for reasons stated above. But let me say something about what science does do, in my view. Science is great at finding apparently repeating patterns in nature and suggesting ways of exploiting those patterns. Science does not tell us specifically what is "behind" those patterns, except by positing models that conform to our best formal systems. But if you understand this point, you'll see just how much goes from us to the world of which we predicate, rather than vice versa.
