[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

[Prof David West]

Privileging "Science' — "Scientific Thinking" — "Scientific Method," even to the extent of deeming it the "best available" tool for acquiring knowledge and understanding, raises some, to me, interesting questions.

The first and most obvious, is why certain questions and lines of investigation will axiomatically be excluded from consideration and therefore need not be raised. A lot, if not most, of the things that really interest me have been excluded from scientific consideration — by scientists.

Other questions:

Why does Science have this status when Science is not done scientifically? Feyerabend is my favorite critic, but there are many others, Kuhn and Knorr-Certina immediately come to mind, that document what appears to be a pretty "open secret" that Science is not scientific.

Is Physics, or more specifically Quantum Physics and Quantum Cosmology, dead? The claim is made that physics espoused in String Theory or Quantum Loop Gravity and the various interpretations of Quantum physics are no longer Science but mere philosophy.

Why is Science more demanding of orthodoxy than even the most rigid religion?

Why does it seem there are no clear scientific, Peircian Consensus, answers to questions like, "Just how dangerous is Covid-19? (This is a softball question, I pretty much know the answer.)

I have seen a lot of scientists on the list channeling, and paraphrasing, Giambattista Vico, "One truly understands only what one can create." (Who was a political philosopher.). Most recently, Marcus, who knows only what he can program.

Using programming as a metaphor for science — without any criticism of Marcus — and using as an example what is often considered the very first computer program, Lady Lovelace's calculation of the Fibonacci Numbers. (What was published was not really a program, it was what we could call today a Stack Trace.)

Most computers are embodied Turing Machines, including the "infinite tape" passing beneath the read-write head. This means there are, quite literally, an infinite number of programs that can calculate Fibonacci numbers. Most apparent argument for this statement: I could write the program in any of a thousand different programming languages and the compiled sequence — the string of ones and zeros — would not be identical across those programs.

There is no way to determine if one program is "more correct" or "better" than any other except by positing arbitrary criteria; e.g. number of machine cycles consumed, memory 'footprint', time of execution, readability of the source code.

Something analogous could be said about scientific theory (I think) in that, scientific theories are judged on the basis of extrinsic, arbitrary, criteria.

And this raises my final question (at least for now), although philosophy may not be essential or integral to the conduct of science, why is it not central to questions about meta-science, i.e. the determination of the extrinsic criteria used to evaluate scientific theory and similar meta-questions about science?

davew