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by lisper 775 days ago
> There is an assumption that this method is a valid, useful, good thing to do.

No, that is not an assumption. That is an observation. The scientific method produces theories with predictive power, and it does this better than any other known method. That is an empirical fact, not an assumption. This is the reason science is a thing.
1 comments
jfengel 775 days ago
Science has not proven that the observation will continue to hold. It happens to have worked so far, but you cannot prove that it will continue to.

You're applying the scientific method to itself, making a large-scale inference from limited data. This is precisely the grounds on which the Logical Positivists realized that they couldn't achieve their ends of putting science on a sound scientific footing.

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mikhailfranco 773 days ago
All facts are provisional. If a validating observation does not continue to hold, that is another observational fact. At some point of replication and sigmas, it becomes another Problem, to be fed back into the scientific meat grinder.

For example, maybe vague observations of Mercury were consistent with Newton. But eventually, telescopes improved, duration of accurate records extended, many good instruments were deployed around the world. Then it became a Problem. Also note that Einstein fitted GR to Mercury, so he could not predict it as independent confirmation. It took the Eddington observation of light bending near the sun, during a solar eclipse, to provide the first evidence (even that was weak, and fixed, but the fix was on the right side of history :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

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lisper 775 days ago
> Science has not proven that the observation will continue to hold. It happens to have worked so far, but you cannot prove that it will continue to.

Yes, that's true. So?

> You're applying the scientific method to itself

Yes, that's true too.

> This is precisely the grounds on which the Logical Positivists realized that they couldn't achieve their ends of putting science on a sound scientific footing.

Maybe, but I'm not making any claims about knowledge. The only claim I'm making is about effectiveness and that's an empirical claim. not a philosophical one. One can go on to hypothesize that science is effective because it is "true" (whatever that means). That seems plausible to me (for some reasonable definition of "true") but it's still just another hypothesis.

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