I said:
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. 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),
That is not what I am saying. I don't think there is a string distinction between the two contexts. I jsut note that asa matter of practice that even an outlier theory or activity that works but can't be easily integrated into what else is done isn't treated as science on the level even with other biology, but as a problem for science to solve.
the extreme form of this being the
>[failed]
>attempts at reductionism.
What about the successful ones?
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.
Yah, yah, and Quine, etc. this is pragmatistic boilerplate. we don't even say "tainted."
further, we also have examples such
>as
>eddington's "proof" of einstein's theory of relativity.
What's this an example of?
finally,
>you
>probably know more about this than i do,
doubt it . . .
but do you really believe
>that
>what is accepted within medical practice today is all scientifically
>justified in the sense you describe?
Of course not.
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).
Your point?
>
>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.
>
But "working" isn't a simple thing. As I've been saying, coherence with what else we know and done matters a lot. "Anything goes" is just a way of science that you can get the wildest stories to stick if you can either make it cohere and get experimental results, or get everyine else to follow you and leave the old stuff behind. But that doesn't mean that you can do anything and call it science. If the scientists don't buy it, it isn't science, and if you insist on having it evualted by scientific standards (e.g., "scientific creationism"), it will fail.
jks
_________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com