So, I’ve been re-reading the arguments presented in this thread, thinking more carefully and chatting with other folk about them.
Not by way of attempting to construct some silly strawman, but more by way of confirming my understanding, I have distilled what I think are the key elements of reasoning behind
Frumious' (and
Bungle's?) counter-arguments to what I have presented (see below).
For brevity’s sake, I also present what I see as being the flaws in those arguments immediately below each point. They are as follows:
i)
Our observations lead us to generate hypotheses, such as mind-independent reality, the predictions of which, we discover to be consistent with that hypothesis (eg: 'something' stimulates the human electro-senses model). Yes, the meaning of Mind-Independent Reality (MIR) is a human construct, and yes, the interpretations of our observations are human constructs. Thus far, this is where scientific inference leads. (My add on to this is that this is still a Mind Dependent Reality (MDR) model of MIR made for convenience and expediency).
The problem here is that this is not an hypothesis at all, because it's
not the thing that actually gets tested. The 'external stimulant' mind independence component, is tacked on extraneously, and has nothing to do with either the model, or the reasons we use the model.
ii)
A 'belief' is a notion held as being true. In science, if used at all, it's something provisionally accepted as true.
Since belief is a human (English) word, we can use it to mean whatever we want (so it's futile to argue about what a belief really is). Thinking more carefully, it would be more useful to have words like this;
- have a meaning which can distinguish two kinds of truth .. objective truth: that we hold because it passes tests that it could have failed, and helps us create accurate predictions and;
- a more subjective form of truth that we hold simply out of a kind of untested preference.
So, in the latter sense, the word "belief", then has nothing to do with scientific thinking. Instead, we just choose what we are going to hold as true, provisionally, and what we are going to test, because we can't test everything all the time. The scientist does not
believe their assumptions (eg such as:
‘We’ll assume the absence of air resistance for a falling object’), they merely
act as if this were true until they decide that they wish to test them.
iii)
Ok, so when testing a prediction of an hypothesis, (such as the one proposed in (i) above), one is testing a logical consequence of that hypothesis; one doesn't know whether one should accept the prediction as being 'true provisionally', until it has been agreed as being logically consistent with that hypothesis. Therefore the: 'something stimulates the human electro-senses' 'hypothesis' is true, provisionally.
As per my response in (i) above, if we remove that part of
any hypothesis that is
actually going to be tested,
the test remaining, is still just exactly the same. Therefore, any added element in the hypothesis, is both extraneous and irrelevant
as far as the test is concerned. Take any example, any theory being tested, any cure for any disease to see this. Eg: if you cure measles, are you testing that measles exists in some MIR, or are you just testing that you have an objective (consistent) outcome there?
So, in summary, the status of
‘provisionally true’ produced under the guise of scientific inference, doesn’t actually produce slightest hint of an
objective test for the mind independence ‘add-on’ .. and so it doesn’t matter how much agreement the argument gathers amongst
logical thinkers. If it could be shown to be wrong, it would be testable, and that would then make it not extraneous.