B Question about inductive and deductive arguments in science

[Ibix]

Father in law. The loss of taste only lasted a week, but he didn't eat a lot for that week, no.

I gather your sense of taste has more to do with the bacteria living in your mouth than you might like to think, and loss of taste or even changed taste is quite a common side effect of high-dose antibiotics. My point was simply that your experience (more sugar = sweeter) has hidden assumptions. Scientific thinking seeks to tease out its assumptions and put them upfront, separate from deductions we make from those assumptions. But you can always find there was an assumption that you didn't know you were making - like your sense of taste being immutable, or time being an absolute, shared concept.

 

[Chenkel]

Father in law. The loss of taste only lasted a week, but he didn't eat a lot for that week, no.

I gather your sense of taste has more to do with the bacteria living in your mouth than you might like to think, and loss of taste or even changed taste is quite a common side effect of high-dose antibiotics. My point was simply that your experience (more sugar = sweeter) has hidden assumptions. Scientific thinking seeks to tease out its assumptions and put them upfront, separate from deductions we make from those assumptions. But you can always find there was an assumption that you didn't know you were making - like your sense of taste being immutable, or time being an absolute, shared concept.

You make a valid point.

I would say knowledge of one's own suffering is very real, the most real.

If there was one last man on earth, he could still practice the scientific method.

If I was the last person on Earth and I kept putting my hand into a fire, I could conclude from the experiment that the longer I hold my hand in the flame, the more intense the pain.

Each second I have it in the flame I have "certain scientific knowledge" that this is a painful experiment.

 

[jbriggs444]

here should be knowable things that can be learned through everyday experience, and there are scientific things, "scientific knowledge" if I'm not mistaken, should be the intersection of the two.

I do not agree. It is a false dichotomy. Both are examples of learning from experience.

Many things that "should" be so turn out not to be so. Good people should live forever. True love should never die. Justice should prevail. Unwise wagers should never pay off. Experiments should always yield correct results. Intelligent people should never reason incorrectly. One should not need to explain such things.

[Sorry, but it is a bit of a pet peeve. Too often a user will complain to me about what a program "should" do while I am working to understand and explain what it does do. "Should" butters no parsnips.]

 

[Herman Trivilino]

So after all this analysis, what does the "scientific knowledge" tell us?

How to build stuff and how to do stuff. Like how to build a moon ship and how to fly it to the moon and back. Or how to build a fish bowl and how to keep fish alive in that bowl.

The value of scientific knowledge lies in its utility.

 

[PeroK]

You make a valid point.

I would say knowledge of one's own suffering is very real, the most real.

If there was one last man on earth, he could still practice the scientific method.

If I was the last person on Earth and I kept putting my hand into a fire, I could conclude from the experiment that the longer I hold my hand in the flame, the more intense the pain.

Each second I have it in the flame I have "certain scientific knowledge" that this is a painful experiment.

YouTube recently served up this gem from the BBC of Hilary Putnam, a professor of the philosophy of science, taking about the scientific method. I'm just watching it over breakfast.

It seems to me that if you are interested in the philosophy of science, you should study it properly, rather than engage in unstructured personal philosophising: