The Philster left a comment on the last post, and my reply has grown to the size that it deserves it's own post (for size, not for content).
The Philster writes:
Dude! I love how you call him out on a fundamental misunderstanding (mischaracterization?) of the scientific enterprise, then apologize for possibly rambling. Iron fist, velvet glove technique.To which I inanely reply:
I really don't want to alienate him: it really is probably me who has it wrong, but I'm not sure where my reasoning has gone off the rails. This seems to me to be something that was pretty well thrashed out by David Hume a couple of centuries ago. Not the pedagogical part, but the understanding that science isn't going to produce knowledge that is "true" in an absolute sense of the word. Mind you, the logical positivists may have tried to revive the notion, but they're pretty much all dead anyways.
I've been feeling pretty good recently epistemologically speaking, but I'm discovering a disturbing post-modernist streak running around the Anthropology department, and now this. Can't we all just get along? Can't we just accept that while there may not be any absolute truth to be found in the world, the methods of and tools of science can and are working to get us vanishingly close?
I've heard arguments that science shouldn't be a privileged source of knowledge (from the post-modernists), but what other source of knowledge is nearly as reliable? Is self-correcting? Doesn't presume to be absolute? And probably most importantly, what other source of knowledge is so spectacularly successful in producing information that allows humans to manipulate and predict empirical reality? For good or ill, science is the schema that works.
Even the "false" (to use Slater's terminology) science of Newtonian mechanics works so well that using it alone we can build machines that have flown to Mars. Maybe it isn't strictly true, but those are some pretty good results for a theory that is "false." I'll take that kind of false any day over the "truth" derived from other methods. But that's just me.
I am however reminded of a couple of XKCD comics:
As I understand it, that's a graph of the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. The solid line is the curve predicted by Einstein, and the dots that are hard to see because they are mostly obscured by the line are the observed values.And this one that I'll just link to.
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