I have lurked this group since long before it had a site or even a name, and throughout the years, I have almost never commented. So I apologize for being critical of someone like yourself who actually does post and contribute, as that is a bit hypocritical of me.
I think you are pattern-matching OP as a member of your outgroup — that is to
say, a theist — then skipping past his argument about the inferential basis of the scientific method to attack him because his post appears to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
I am familiar with some physics, some math, and some epistemology — not enough to be an expert, but enough to where I think OP’s argument is reasonably well-defined and not equivalent to extreme skepticism about everything. I can’t find a clear basis to dismiss OP’s argument (at least as to the inferential limitations of science) as bullshit. (I don’t think OP has established at all the truth of theism or anything like that, but he only appears to make a single terse allusion to it at the end of his argument, and perhaps was using it rhetorically as bait.)
As someone whose intuition is that we do have objective evidence for scientific laws, I’ve been hoping that some mathematician or philosopher would eventually pop in here and formally demolish OP’s argument in a direction pleasing to my sensibilities, and I subscribed to the thread to wait for that to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. @self_made_human, who will often deliver an incisive and sometimes brutal presentation of the traditional rationalist materialist viewpoint, appears to have lost interest. And of the two posters in this thread, @sqeecoo and @IGI-111, who appear most literate in the epistemology of science (or at least, more literate than me), neither has outright dismissed OP’s major premises as nonsensical or solipsistic, and it appears that I will have to read some Popper if I want to get to the bottom of it for myself.
My questions for you, or anyone, are:
(1) What is the first premise or step in OP’s argument that is clearly unreasonable / irrational?
(2) Is OP’s “principle of abductive inference” truly the inferential basis of the scientific method, and if not, what is, and how does it work?
(3) Is it impossible to infer universal physical laws with greater than 0% confidence, as OP claims?
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
p
I have lurked this group since long before it had a site or even a name, and throughout the years, I have almost never commented. So I apologize for being critical of someone like yourself who actually does post and contribute, as that is a bit hypocritical of me.
I think you are pattern-matching OP as a member of your outgroup — that is to say, a theist — then skipping past his argument about the inferential basis of the scientific method to attack him because his post appears to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
I am familiar with some physics, some math, and some epistemology — not enough to be an expert, but enough to where I think OP’s argument is reasonably well-defined and not equivalent to extreme skepticism about everything. I can’t find a clear basis to dismiss OP’s argument (at least as to the inferential limitations of science) as bullshit. (I don’t think OP has established at all the truth of theism or anything like that, but he only appears to make a single terse allusion to it at the end of his argument, and perhaps was using it rhetorically as bait.)
As someone whose intuition is that we do have objective evidence for scientific laws, I’ve been hoping that some mathematician or philosopher would eventually pop in here and formally demolish OP’s argument in a direction pleasing to my sensibilities, and I subscribed to the thread to wait for that to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. @self_made_human, who will often deliver an incisive and sometimes brutal presentation of the traditional rationalist materialist viewpoint, appears to have lost interest. And of the two posters in this thread, @sqeecoo and @IGI-111, who appear most literate in the epistemology of science (or at least, more literate than me), neither has outright dismissed OP’s major premises as nonsensical or solipsistic, and it appears that I will have to read some Popper if I want to get to the bottom of it for myself.
My questions for you, or anyone, are:
(1) What is the first premise or step in OP’s argument that is clearly unreasonable / irrational?
(2) Is OP’s “principle of abductive inference” truly the inferential basis of the scientific method, and if not, what is, and how does it work?
(3) Is it impossible to infer universal physical laws with greater than 0% confidence, as OP claims?
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
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