I also don’t think the discussion is about definitions, but I think it’s being made needlessly more difficult by differences in definitions.
It is (I think) a simple matter of empirical fact that most of the time scientists get information from one another without saying “show me!”. That doesn’t mean that “show me!” isn’t always there in the background—it is—but only that the actual practice of science-broadly-conceived (by which I don’t mean “science-narrowly-conceived plus fake science”, I mean “science-narrowly-conceived plus the other things scientists do without which science as a whole would make much less progress”) does in fact involve subjective probability assessments on the basis of experts’ opinions.
It is (I think) a simple matter of empirical fact that most of the time scientists get information from one another without saying “show me!”.
Actually, I will disagree with that. There is a reason published papers consist mostly of detailed descriptions of what was done and what happened. If what you are saying were true, executive summaries would suffice: We have discovered that frobnicating frotzed blivets leads to emission of magic smoke. The End.
Certainly, large parts of scientific knowledge have passed into the “just accept it’s true” realm, but any new claims are required to be supported by fairly large amounts of “show me”.
If what you are saying were true, executive summaries would suffice
I don’t see why. The details are there for the following reasons, none of which appears to me to be invalidated by anything I’ve said. (1) They are interesting for their own sake (to those immersed in the field, at least). (2) They clarify what useful opportunities there may be for followup work (“Hmm, all their blivets were frotzed with titanium chloride. What happens if we use uranium nitride instead?”). (3) They provide a way to do “show me!”-like checks for those relatively few who want to without needing to interrogate the authors (replicating the analysis is easier than replicating the experiment). (4) They provide, in principle, the information needed for a more thorough “show me!” check (outright replication) for those even fewer who want to do that.
If you’ve got the impression that I don’t agree that independent experimental test is the nearest thing we have to an ultimate arbiter of scientific truth, then I’ve been unclear or you’ve been obtuse or both; I do agree with that. Most of the time, though, scientists don’t go all the way to the ultimate arbiter.
I also don’t think the discussion is about definitions, but I think it’s being made needlessly more difficult by differences in definitions.
It is (I think) a simple matter of empirical fact that most of the time scientists get information from one another without saying “show me!”. That doesn’t mean that “show me!” isn’t always there in the background—it is—but only that the actual practice of science-broadly-conceived (by which I don’t mean “science-narrowly-conceived plus fake science”, I mean “science-narrowly-conceived plus the other things scientists do without which science as a whole would make much less progress”) does in fact involve subjective probability assessments on the basis of experts’ opinions.
Actually, I will disagree with that. There is a reason published papers consist mostly of detailed descriptions of what was done and what happened. If what you are saying were true, executive summaries would suffice: We have discovered that frobnicating frotzed blivets leads to emission of magic smoke. The End.
Certainly, large parts of scientific knowledge have passed into the “just accept it’s true” realm, but any new claims are required to be supported by fairly large amounts of “show me”.
I don’t see why. The details are there for the following reasons, none of which appears to me to be invalidated by anything I’ve said. (1) They are interesting for their own sake (to those immersed in the field, at least). (2) They clarify what useful opportunities there may be for followup work (“Hmm, all their blivets were frotzed with titanium chloride. What happens if we use uranium nitride instead?”). (3) They provide a way to do “show me!”-like checks for those relatively few who want to without needing to interrogate the authors (replicating the analysis is easier than replicating the experiment). (4) They provide, in principle, the information needed for a more thorough “show me!” check (outright replication) for those even fewer who want to do that.
If you’ve got the impression that I don’t agree that independent experimental test is the nearest thing we have to an ultimate arbiter of scientific truth, then I’ve been unclear or you’ve been obtuse or both; I do agree with that. Most of the time, though, scientists don’t go all the way to the ultimate arbiter.