>>i am afraid we are going around (at least i am) in circles. that science
>>produces results seems to be only because scientists immediately adopt
>>anything that works, as a science. so in effect, it only holds true that
>>science is what scientists do.
>
> Well, it's not as bad as all that. What works is not a grab bag. There's a
> coherence and structure to it. Thus, Einstein overturns classical mechanics
> one sort of basis, and the quantum revolution on another, but lo!
> relativistic effects show up at the quantum level. If something "worked"
> that didn't cohere at all with the other things we know, we'd insist on
> making it fit, seeking an explanation in terms of the things we know, before
> we accpted it whole-heartedly.
>
yes, i agree. which is why i mentioned in the earlier response on the issues of "context of justification". i think i explicitly stated (in response to yoshie if i remember) that the "context of justification" reasoning says: ok, so there is no single scientific method and the "context of discovery" is anarchic, but the scientist is still bound to justify his/her findings within an established framework (mathematical description, for example), the extreme form of this being the [failed] attempts at reductionism. however, even here, pkf/others have shown that often facts are tainted by theories and new theories are introduced ad hoc in order to explain facts. further, we also have examples such as eddington's "proof" of einstein's theory of relativity. finally, you probably know more about this than i do, but do you really believe that what is accepted within medical practice today is all scientifically justified in the sense you describe? of course they may officially call such treatments a "conjecture" but they do use them (and this goes back to our "trust" in scientific procedures).
my point is that science deserves prestige if we agree that science is what scientists do, and what they do is use a grab bag of rules of thumb and ruthless opportunism to embrace everything that works, evolving and extending a context of justification as they go.
--ravi