> I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick to the

> I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role in the theory, rather than being a mere addition, and that you can you can actually use the theory to build a transistor radio. I cannot upvote this more. It seems all too easy to criticize scientific methods as being baseless or assuming some odd construction about the universe or the context or whatever it's embedded in, but it's so easy to overlook the fact that there are only so many (read: extremely few) ways one can construct a theory with the same predictive power as that of physics which has the same or less number of free variables. Thank you for putting into words something I've tried so hard to verbalize to some of my friends who please themselves with criticizing positivism/post-positivism as being woefully naive (relative to, say, constructivism), yet benefit infinitely from it.