> My pet theory is that success of predictions of modern science helped us achieve a local maximum which, while useful, also makes it difficult to evolve towards a higher (globally) maximum.
> The axioms are:
> 1. Some models are useful, but all models are necessarily incorrect, incomplete, and/or unfalsifiable. (This can be restated in an unsettling, for a natural science enthusiast, manner as “there is always the unexplained”.)
> 2. We cannot know where the incorrectness/incompleteness lies.
(It is an axiom because I strongly suspect I will maintain this position but am not willing to spend time defending it. Maybe I should call it “assumption”.)
Ah. Sorry, I'm responding to a dozen different threads and I'm having trouble keeping all the context in my head.
I think your axiom #2 is almost certainly correct. But just because we can't know where all of the uncertainty lies doesn't mean we can't know where some of it does.
I think of models as maps—sure, we are able to map Earth with high accuracy (though still have numerous maps all useful for different things), but only because we are now able to be outside of it; this will never be true for the system that we are modeling using scientific method and that we ourselves are part of.
We will forever have many incomplete maps. Scientific method offers one such map, a product of a particular way of attending to the world, and while it is useful for some purposes I am not sure it is inherently better than other maps. It does not help that it tries (maybe not by design, but at least that’s how it seems to be playing out so far) to sidestep the fact that our minds are both map-creators and part of the territory.
> The axioms are:
> 1. Some models are useful, but all models are necessarily incorrect, incomplete, and/or unfalsifiable. (This can be restated in an unsettling, for a natural science enthusiast, manner as “there is always the unexplained”.)
> 2. We cannot know where the incorrectness/incompleteness lies.
(It is an axiom because I strongly suspect I will maintain this position but am not willing to spend time defending it. Maybe I should call it “assumption”.)