Originally posted by Tassman
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What do you do for a living? Are you a practicing physicist? Are you a philosopher? This is my JOB, Tass. I've done this for close to 20 years. And I'm telling you: you don't know what you're talking about!
Only pseudo-scientists such as creation-scientists care about blurring the distinction between real science and pseudoscience in order to teach their myths in schools and pursue their own religious agenda e.g. re climate change.
Who cares “WHAT “OTHER METHODOLOGIES 'show', or 'verify', or 'demonstrate' IN THEIR OWN WAY, RELATIVE TO THEIR OWN METHODOLOGY, within the scope of the particular discipline?” LOL. None of them can be shown to be true in practical terms, only bona-fide science can put a man on the moon.
Shown by whom?
Popper has been shown to overly consider the epistemology of science to the exclusion of the history of science; Kuhn has been shown to overly consider the history of science to the exclusion of the epistemology of science. The SOLUTION was Lakatos's idea of RESEARCH PROGRAMS which COMBINES both. IRONICALLY, Popper came to see that Lakatos' notion of research programs actually provided the conditions under which the idea of falsification ITSELF (as a necessary and jointly sufficient condition for scientific practice) was itself falsified! I would go into more, but you'll just accuse me of writing too much. But that's the nuts and bolts of it. The idea is that falsification ends up only being necessary or sufficient RELATIVE TO particular scientific endeavors, experiments, and practice; but it cannot be UNIVERSALIZED to encompass ALL such endeavors, experiments, and practices. It suffers from a wholesale rejection of positive confirmation, accepted as appropriate by most scientists. Further, falsifiability is problematic in light of auxiliary hypotheses and human choice, which is Lakatos' point. And, there are some statements that are perfectly empirical yet impossible to demonstrate to be false.
Nonsense! What “new truths” did Aristotle generate from his assumed premises that reality consisted of just four elements...or that the cosmos consisted of “celestial spheres? None! Because his assumed premises were wrong...and it took science to show that they were wrong.
You do know that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics CANNOT go together, right? One or the other has to go. Is there going to be a future Tassman, a thousand years from now, that's going to denounce Einstein as a pseudo-scientist because he believed in this mythical space-time curvature to explain gravity? THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE! I don't know how it's going to go down. No one does. But BOTH theories CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. Science advances. Aristotle's achievements were spectacular using what he had, but Aristotle would have been thrilled to be corrected by later advances by Kepler, Newton, and so on.
And to argue that because Aristotle's a priori reasoning was wrong, and has since been corrected by science, that therefore ALL a priori premises utilized by 21st century metaphysicians is an inference that is so disgustingly sweeping that it would be LITERALLY laughed at in the conferences I attend.
No scientific theory can be proven, it can only be disproven.
Neither of Einstein’s theories of Relativity has been disproven in over a century of rigorous testing. So there is good reason to consider them true and they have had important consequences in modern science.
I know, it's for the untold masses hanging on your every word.
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