My take: the author has a conflation of data and models; a conflation which serves to totally hide the question at hand: the value and interpretation of this bo

My take: the author has a conflation of data and models; a conflation which serves to totally hide the question at hand: the value and interpretation of this body of work we call Science. I'd think most follow epistemologies that allow for the value of data: things you see, touch, taste, measure, or otherwise experience have an informative effect upon you and are (so far in human history, I hope and, in absence of omniscience, believe) consistent. Science is not data though. It goes one step further and seeks to compress observation via generation of models. Or to take the other side of the debate, it seeks to unearth the generating rules of our universe. It thus is a process of turning informative data into — well — something not too different from belief. In any case, it seems strongly motivated (to our pattern seeking minds anyway) by that aforementioned consistency: something seems to be afoot. Here's how we can find what that is. Then the question is "what does it mean?". Though, by Popperian philosophy you're safe right here, right? So long as your models provide verisimilitude to your experience (ie. accurately predict it) then they have value — lets not take it any further, now. The question is avoided by taking an interpretation where it doesn't even exist. When someone says they believe in science, they're probably coming from a a certain class of interpretation. They may believe that science is a viable process to generate verisimilitudinous statements. They may believe that science is capable of fully divulging the rules which, axiomatically, created our reality. They may believe that science is the careful interpretation of the will of Some Kind of Divinity. And, who knows, perhaps all three of those interpretations are equally valid, deeply identical, or too blurred by our imprecise understanding and language (Wittgenstein stood here, I think). I feel a great deal of desire to side with this philosophical point of view; and so I'm spending the most energy being skeptical with it. --- Anyway, a lot of really smart people have spent a lot of energy trying to settle their minds with this question if not answer it. I hardly think you can do science without somehow coming to peace with that. The author doesn't seem to want to go there though, and that's fair when battling someone who's really disagreeing all the way back on the consistency of the world bit. Without that, you can't even have the reductionism that science depends on. I'm curious to pore through Popper, Hoffstaedter, Gauss (Jaynes too I suppose), Wittgenstein, and Peirce hoping to see what they all thought about it, though.