Great example, Eliezer. 2 + 2 = 4. This is one of those rituals that scientists go through every time the analyze data. Do they sit down and prove 2 + 2 = 4? No, they don’t. They stand on the shoulders of greater men (to use Newton’s phrase I believe), and use their computers to move on. Requiring every working scientist to reexamine every assumption—is well, philosophical (which is fine) and uneconomical (which is less so).
I’m beginning to think that the blogger at hand doesn’t understand science. Was there anything we could call science before peer review? Isn’t science not only the repeatablility of the experiment but also the validity of its method? How do you know your experiment’s method is valid? Isn’t the majority of the method based on tried and true techniques learned in school, ie, tradition? Whenever a chemist uses a pipet load a chemical to into a test tube, how does he know it’s the correct quantity? Etc, etc.
The criterion is too high. Too many of today’s scientists—personally, I bet, all of them—would have to pack up their bags and go home if they couldn’t hold any unprovable beliefs (as last year’s Edge.org essays demonstrated, most people believe something they cannot prove). Certainly we’d have to discard Newton, Einstein, Godel from the pantheon for their metaphysics.
Great example, Eliezer. 2 + 2 = 4. This is one of those rituals that scientists go through every time the analyze data. Do they sit down and prove 2 + 2 = 4? No, they don’t. They stand on the shoulders of greater men (to use Newton’s phrase I believe), and use their computers to move on. Requiring every working scientist to reexamine every assumption—is well, philosophical (which is fine) and uneconomical (which is less so).
I’m beginning to think that the blogger at hand doesn’t understand science. Was there anything we could call science before peer review? Isn’t science not only the repeatablility of the experiment but also the validity of its method? How do you know your experiment’s method is valid? Isn’t the majority of the method based on tried and true techniques learned in school, ie, tradition? Whenever a chemist uses a pipet load a chemical to into a test tube, how does he know it’s the correct quantity? Etc, etc.
The criterion is too high. Too many of today’s scientists—personally, I bet, all of them—would have to pack up their bags and go home if they couldn’t hold any unprovable beliefs (as last year’s Edge.org essays demonstrated, most people believe something they cannot prove). Certainly we’d have to discard Newton, Einstein, Godel from the pantheon for their metaphysics.