Repeatable experimentation is susceptible to confirmation bias. The scientific method is dubious because it is seems to me impossible to isolate all variables but one in any experiment. What we have is confirmation based on the limits of our understanding and capacity to discern minute differences, and the faith that repetition = truth.
That’s why I am a big fan of Nassim Taleb’s work. He likes to push the boundaries of what we think we know, and point out that so much of what we take for granted as truth, is just ignorance rationalized.
I highly recommend this video if one wants to take a deeper look at epistemology, without which I do not think honesty is possible.
It’s important to stress the limitations of the scientific method, and that it is no substitution for logical deductive reasoning, however we must be careful not to go overboard. There are many fields where it has proven very useful despite its limitations.
One such radical example is Quantum Mechanics. This is an example of a very complex theory that has been derived almost exclusively on the basis of the laws of probability. Yet, nobody would deny its usefulness.
No alternative epistemology even comes close to rivaling the scientific method.
Even the criticisms are laughable: what the heck do you expect to happen when you step foot onto a plane?
We can all be wrong on even the most rudimentary details of our worldview, so we should always be open-minded; but, when it comes to being approximately right, nothing beats science. Bayesian reasoning FTW.
Also, the scientific method is at best a tool. It is no substitute for logic. You cannot makes sense of scientific experimentation results without logically deductive reasoning.
DD5, while I think Paul Feyerabend made important contributions to an anarcho-methodological perspective, and while I believe Thomas Kuhn (and others) were right to view the scientific process in a sociological lens, I still think science can be reduced quite nicely to the scientific method.
Then once again, you cut the very branch you were sitting on. It is nonsensical to criticize or cast doubt in logic without also undermining the scientific method. The latter relies on the former.
No alternative epistemology even comes close to rivaling the scientific method.
Just to signal this sentence out (among others). This is kind of a nonsensical sentence and line of thought that can not be argued or really spoken of in any logical manner on it’s own (as it begs to be taken in a vacuum, and it is a value statement). To discuss the merits and meaning of the scientific method (and they are plethora) one has to immediatly limit the perameters of the language they use to cut out idealistic skepticism and mystification of language, as well as aknowledging the meaning of existential reality (Stirnerite egoism is an ontological fact).
To claim that I am a person that “just make[s] it up” only confesses your own stupidity.
And that’s okay. It’s nice to have mounting evidence.
But, to reference Quine’s fallibilistic, empirical commitments as grounds for leaving logic open to revision is (A) an argument I’ve made before and at length, not an ad hoc rambling (B) a very well-known naturalistic philosophy that anyone with a cursory knowledge of 20th-century philosophy should recognize.
So far, I’ve seen very little evidence–none, actually–that you’ve investigated the ideas of contemporary philosophy.
Furthermore, it’s quite a leap to claim that experience is unusable without fully-developed logic or maths first. Is that how it worked in history? Did humans actually have full-blown logic before they interacted with the external world? I can’t even make sense of such an idea. And, to claim “apodictic certainty” from deductive reasoning always leaves me baffled: how do you believe the human body generate “concepts,” and how could you possibly trust them so absolutely? This is a mechanical process dependent on many contingencies.
Either way, the more you wish to ridicule well-respected arguments from our most eminent philosophers, the more I’ll rest confident your arguments can only reveal ignorance. (Don’t worry, I already know you’re about to bust out an “appeal to authority” here–of course, I have enough sense to trust reputation, which is considered even by Austrians to carry important information).
Repeatable experimentation is susceptible to confirmation bias. The scientific method is dubious because it is seems to me impossible to isolate all variables but one in any experiment. What we have is confirmation based on the limits of our understanding and capacity to discern minute differences, and the faith that repetition = truth.
If this is his criticism it shows that he doesn’t really get the point of the whole scientific method business. Look, nobody is claiming that you can control all variables in every experiment all the time. The point is that by making explicit your requirements for a theory to be scientific you can improve the efficiency with which you weed out those theories that don’t fit reality.
Of course, the process isn’t always that smooth. But it’s the best we can do.
Exactly, at least the scientific method makes explicit what it would take to reject a piece of research. On the other hand, I’ve always found it a weakness of Austrian economics that it’s not quite clear exactly what it would take to disprove a particular theory or piece of research. Take the ABCT, Mises expert Richard Ebeling claims that Mises original exposition was actually only meant to describe the course of one particular housing bubble in Vienna, and no more than that.
And yet people still try desperate to make the facts fit their theory and presume that the ABCT is applicable to every business cycle in history.
Well, it is possible to work with an implicit praxeology, logic, or mathematics. Ludwig von Mises didn’t contend that his mainstream contemporaries didn’t use praxeology, but just that they weren’t explicit in doing so, which led them to have an unsystematic, unscientific body of theory, which they used to study history, instead of what he thought could be a systematic, scientific body of theory. He didn’t contend that his mainstream comtemporaries didn’t make use of non-empirical facts like means and ends, desire, and so on, but just that they used their common sense versions of those ideas.
So they didn’t have to have a fully developed praxeology, logic, and mathematics to study the empirical world right from the beginning, but just needed a common sense praxeology, logic, and mathematics, to do so.
