[davesims]

Where to begin with this?

This is naive scientific triumphalism of the first order, utterly illiterate with regards to the philosophical foundations of science, the rigorous and multi-layered debates over the status of scientific statements that have been ongoing for centuries to the present day: from Bacon, Gallileo and Descartes (with deep roots in Lucretius, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Epicurus, Heraclitus) through Spinoza, Leibniz and Newton himself, on into such titans as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Quine.

And yet! And yet! It was all so simple, gads and forsooth!!

I give you the final word, gentle reader, it was all for naught, these men with their devotion to rigor and clarity of thought, their conversations spanning centuries, their volumes of pointless abstraction, Hegel with his historicism and Kant with his categories, cynical Kuhn and his paradigms, pragmatic Popper with his Worlds 1 and 2, Whitehead with his ingressions pseudo-Aristotelian speculations and Bergson teasing out duration and intuition.

Throw out your Rutledge Encyclopedia: and behold the simplicity they all failed to grasp:

A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.

How hard is that indeed!! Not hard at all. Simplicity itself, devastating in its directness and comprehensive competence, lovely in its completeness. Centuries of debate quelled in a single utterance. Well done.

[lutusp]

> This is naive scientific triumphalism of the first order ...

Translation: "Okay, science works. Stop gloating!"

> Centuries of debate quelled in a single utterance.

Yes, and correct.

[davesims]

Look, I sympathize. Philosophy, as the core discipline of human thought, has established beyond any doubt that there are limits to empirical human inquiry, and scientists don't like that idea. The standard response of scientific cheerleaders like, for instance, Lawrence Krauss, is to simply sniff at the entire enterprise, and assume there must be some problem with "those philosophers," rather than entertain the notion that there may, in fact, be limitations to reason and scientific inquiry.

This is fine. If you're too lazy and content in your own unexamined assumptions to read a few hundred pages of the men who did the hard work that gave you your entire livelihood, it will not affect your ability to do practical research.

But let's be clear about some of the practical implications of that position:

* Science does not need to be rational in any meaningful sense. (Go ahead and try to reinvent that idea without falling ass-backwards into the same problems "those philosophers" have been working through for centuries. Go ahead, I'll wait.)

* It does not need to be consistent within its own assumptions.

* Science is de facto "true", simply by virtue of being practiced by someone who claims to be doing science.

* Since we've now abdicated the rigorous discipline of establishing secure definitions, the notion of empirical science is now free-floating, ad hoc, and vulnerable to redefinition at any turn. The only thing required is for a group of men who call themselves "scientists" who have a different agenda to take control of a majority of significant journals or the community at large and impose their definition by fiat.

Philosophy may seem to be arcane and needlessly obsessed with definitions. And when its obscure language intrudes into the hard work of real empirical research, it can seem to be a giant non sequitur that can be easily ignored, as science moves forward (whatever "forward" means, now that we can't establish what is truly salutary and what is not).

But such willful ignorance not only skirts the fact that it was such philosophical examination of the limits and range of human knowledge that actually established science to begin with, that sort of ignorance sets enormously dangerous precedents, a sort of intellectual stare decisis for the future of human inquiry. It opens the door to sophistry, demagoguery and ultimately pure irrationalism.

History is long, and intellectual tyranny is opportunistic. Whatever integrity and above-board intentions you think scientists can maintain in the long-term, on good will alone and not deep self-awareness of core philosophical discipline is absurdly naive. Without a community committed to rationality (which is what philosophy does even if it only sets up negative limitations that seem unsatisfactory to scientists who want carte blanche to do whatever they want), then the entire discipline in the long term most likely will be taken over by non-rational concerns: commercial, military, governmental or even religious.

Absent the basic language provided by philosophy that can give at least some basic definitions and intellectual rigor for what is and isn't "science" (again, good luck reinventing all that), welcome back to the pre-socratic age of sophistry, demagoguery and a new Dark Ages. Just give it a century or so -- buy hey, you won't be around, so why worry?