I think you are confusing certainty with knowledge.
It is simply not true that our scientific knowledge is produced by theories. Most of our knowledge is non-theoretical and even most of our scientific knowledge is non-theoretical. Theoretical knowledge gives us access to questions that we would never even thought of asking and provides a program for a search for phenomena that might otherwise have been ignored, so in this sense theoretical models are "deeper" and also more certain than other kinds of knowledge.
But most scientific knowledge is simply descriptive and observational. Sometimes this knowledge is informed by theory but often it is not. (All knowledge is of course informed by what Engels called "world view".) Nabokov's description of his "Blues" during his detailed work on butterflies added tremendously to our knowledge of this species. But it was only description and Nabokov himself was even anti-evolutionary theory and believed that his kind of detailed descriptions were counterweights to such theory. Most scientific work is often simply verifiable and repeated description on this level. It doesn't make it less scientific. People who study the structure of "societies" among the social insects are sometimes informed by theories or hypotheses, but as often as not they are simply trying to describe the structure of these societies and the relations with others of their species.
Or to take another pair of examples: For more than a hundred years we have known for sure that aspirin helps to relieve pain beyond a placebo effect. But it has only been very recently that we have begun to understand why. On the other hand, we know that there is a "placebo effect" though we don't know exactly know how it works or why, and are only now getting small glimpses of that the "placebo effect" might actually be. But the fact that we can't explain the placebo effect by either describing its physiological origins or integrating it into a larger theory of biology doesn't mean that are knowledge of it is obviated.
Granted, good scientific theories are empirically verified, but the core
> of scientific knowledge is the theories that we have created, not just
> some unorganized pile of "facts". --Even further: the use of every
> scientific measurement tool is predicated on one or more auxiliary
> measurement theories, so scientific knowledge is impossible without
> theories.
>
> I think this hinges on different definitions of "theory". Put most
> simply, a theory explains the observed relationships among two or more
> variables. I suspect Jerry is working with a different definition.
Your suspicion is correct. Your definition is so minimal as to make absolutely any observation a theory. This definition is fine with me but if so we will have to find another definition for the kind of "theory" that Chomsky discusses when he says that "universal grammar" is more a "research program" than a theory; or the kind of theory that S. J. Gould discussed in his long chapter One of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." Or the kind of discussion about theory that revolved around the scientific debates over the meaning and theoretical basis of the periodic table that took place in the first forty years of the 20th century.
Jerry
Miles
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