Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
It works. If it didn't work, we wouldn't do it. But it has been spectacularly successful in learning how the physical universe works. There are other approaches advocated by some. They don't work. And for scientists, that matters. That it can't provide logical certainty doesn't matter much to anyone; after all we live our lives by depending on knowledge that is rarely logically certain.
And there's the point. We can be certain about evidence. It's something known to be true. There are fossils of dinosaurs with feathers. Acids and bases, when mixed together produce salts. Stuff like that. I haven't "slipped"; I'm distinguishing between facts that are observed evidence and theories, which are ideas that have been confirmed (but not absolutely proven) by facts.
It wasn't uncommon in higher-level biology courses in the 1960s. But unfortunately, philosophy hasn't been as important in sciences lately. IIRC, a good discussion of this can be found in Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is.
I'm fully aware of that.
Pragmatics certainly gives us reason to do it, but it's more than just uncertain. It's questionable whether it can be considered knowledge at all.
We can't be certain about evidence, though. You're talking out of both sides of your mouth in this post. First you acknowledge that scientific theories are never certain, then you assert certitude. It is this very confusion that I am opposed to. It is formally acknowledged that science is "provisional" but then it is claimed to be producing facts. Yet the only way to justify it is circularly.
Establishing what is a fact requires certitude, which you claim science doesn't do.
People who've never spent a single day working as a professional scientist lecturing about what it's like to work as a scientist
Scientific epistemology begins from the idea that the truth of a universal statement, such as a scientific law, can never be conclusively proved. No matter how successful a hypothesis has been in the past, it can always turn out to make incorrect predictions when applied in a new situation. Karl Popper argued that the most important experimental results are those that falsify a theory, and he proposed falsifiability as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Popper argued in addition that scientists should respond to falsifications in a particular way: not by ad hoc adjustments of their theories, but in a way that expands the theory’s explanatory content. Popper argued that the success of a modified theory should be judged in terms of its success at making new predictions. Popper’s view of epistemology, which is shared by many scientists and philosophers of science, is called “critical rationalism.”
I'm not sure what your purpose is in quoting this. No where am I challenging evolution as a scientific theory, and "the problem of universals" isn't about universal statements but whether or not there are real shared essences between groups of things.Scientific epistemology begins from the idea that the truth of a universal statement, such as a scientific law, can never be conclusively proved. No matter how successful a hypothesis has been in the past, it can always turn out to make incorrect predictions when applied in a new situation. Karl Popper argued that the most important experimental results are those that falsify a theory, and he proposed falsifiability as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Popper argued in addition that scientists should respond to falsifications in a particular way: not by ad hoc adjustments of their theories, but in a way that expands the theory’s explanatory content. Popper argued that the success of a modified theory should be judged in terms of its success at making new predictions. Popper’s view of epistemology, which is shared by many scientists and philosophers of science, is called “critical rationalism.”
The Epistemology of Science (Chapter 1) - A Philosophical Approach to MOND
A Philosophical Approach to MOND - April 2020www.cambridge.org
Following his own principles, Popper took a close look at evolutionary theory and concluded:
The theory of natural selection may be so formulated that it is far from tautological. In this case it is not only testable, but it turns out to be not strictly universally true. There seem to be exceptions, as with so many biological theories; and considering the random character of the variations on which natural selection operates, the occurrence of exceptions is not surprising. [p. 346]
Of course we can. For example, the evolution of the genus Homo seems to have been occasioned by a chromosome fusion. The hypothesis predicted that there would be traces of telomeres at the hypothesized fusion site. And the remnants are there, exactly where they should be if there had been a fusion. The hypothesis was a fusion. All hypotheses must be testable. And when tested, it was verified, becoming a confirmed theory.
There's a difference between theories and facts. The theory is a chromosome fusion. The fact is telomere remains at the site where the fusion would have occurred. The fact of remains is certain and repeatably demonstrable. The conclusion is only provisionally true. For example, it's possible that hundreds of random mutations might have somehow happened precisely as to appear to be telomere remains. The likelihood of this is less than the likelihood of shuffling a deck of carts and having all the cards in numerical order by suit. And there's the problem of one human chromosome lining up precisely with two chimpanzee chromosomes. But it's not completely impossible, even if it's stupendously unlikely.
See above.
I'm saying Mayr discussed the reasons biologists were once expected to have some proficiency in philosophy. Your comments make it clear that you know what evolution is.
People who've never spent a single day working as a professional scientist lecturing about what it's like to work as a scientist
Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge. It's part of philosophy of science. Critical rationalism, as defined by Karl Popper, is widely accepted by scientists.
There is much more at play than methodological results. When I brought up the problem of universals, I'm refering to an unsolved epistemic problem that if only particular things exist, then knowledge cannot be had because any piece of information we discover can only be applied to that particular case. But if species exist, then knowledge cannot be had because we only observe accidents of particulars and not essences. Science sets aside genuine skepticism and attempts to justify our exploration a priori, thereby removing the possibility of knowledge in favor of pragmatic development.
Evidence requires both a theory and a fact. And the "provisionally true" is where the problem comes in, because the provisions are never overtly stated or acknowledged to the point that the phrase is more of a meaningless concession to a technicality.
I don't know what you're referring to.
My point is that, as someone who actually works in science, none of the topics being bandied about and debated in this thread matter to our daily work. While debates over philosophical considerations may be intellectually stimulating and engaging to some here, they have no relevance to anything I or my co-workers do.
