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I somewhat agree, but "is it true?" is all that science can answer. A mechanism is really just a narrower example without irrelevant distractions or confoundin

I somewhat agree, but "is it true?" is all that science can answer. A mechanism is really just a narrower example without irrelevant distractions or confounding variables. Kind of like the difference between the bug reports: "run this complex workload on this specific machine and it will orobably crash after a few hours" versus "run these three commands when the cache is cold and it crashes".

fleitz 9y ago
Actually all science can really answer is 'is it false?'.
jjgreen 9y ago
I find it odd that the sibling reply by fleitz (all that science can say is "is it false"), which just a precis of Popperian philosophy of science, has been marked dead. Not a view that I share, but seems uncontroversial.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Agreed, indeed my immediate response to that comment was "that's not how science works, it's falsificationist". What is your view on science, do you think it can create - and verify - a true result? Whither axiomatic underpinning in such a view?
  - jjgreen 9y ago
    Well thanks for asking. I think it's clear that science gets us truth, but that the mechanism for that complex social activity can't be reduced to a few axioms or principles; Feyerabend gives a detailed description [1] of how bad a scientist Galileo was (as judged by modern theories of what science is), yet he was right, and he advanced truth. [1] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      And thanks for responding ... Heliocentrism isn't truth, it's opinion [that's my opinion, lol!!]. Einstein's relativity makes heliocentrism false in demanding that there is no aether and so no special points in space. Science provides our understanding of a best current description of reality - the whole point of scientific endeavour is to demonstrate we were wrong and that our understanding/description was flawed. Moreover it relies on maths, which is provably unable to verify it's own consistency and completeness. Furthermore it's an axiomatic system that produces a probabilistic framework that gives us little to hang our conception of reality on [what I'm saying is our perception is not particularly informed by physical reality, we have to subdue our instinctive perceptions to work with what amounts to our best, most consistent, physics view of reality]. Science gives us as much truth as we can see in a well lit test-tube.
      - senderista 9y ago
        Actually GR makes both geocentrism and heliocentrism "true". One is free to pick whatever coordinate system is most convenient to solve a given problem.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Mathematical simplicity is insufficient for truth in my epistemology. Sounds very Platonic.

fleitz 9y ago

Actually all science can really answer is 'is it false?'.

jjgreen 9y ago

I find it odd that the sibling reply by fleitz (all that science can say is "is it false"), which just a precis of Popperian philosophy of science, has been marked dead. Not a view that I share, but seems uncontroversial.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Agreed, indeed my immediate response to that comment was "that's not how science works, it's falsificationist". What is your view on science, do you think it can create - and verify - a true result? Whither axiomatic underpinning in such a view?
- jjgreen 9y ago
  Well thanks for asking. I think it's clear that science gets us truth, but that the mechanism for that complex social activity can't be reduced to a few axioms or principles; Feyerabend gives a detailed description [1] of how bad a scientist Galileo was (as judged by modern theories of what science is), yet he was right, and he advanced truth. [1] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    And thanks for responding ... Heliocentrism isn't truth, it's opinion [that's my opinion, lol!!]. Einstein's relativity makes heliocentrism false in demanding that there is no aether and so no special points in space. Science provides our understanding of a best current description of reality - the whole point of scientific endeavour is to demonstrate we were wrong and that our understanding/description was flawed. Moreover it relies on maths, which is provably unable to verify it's own consistency and completeness. Furthermore it's an axiomatic system that produces a probabilistic framework that gives us little to hang our conception of reality on [what I'm saying is our perception is not particularly informed by physical reality, we have to subdue our instinctive perceptions to work with what amounts to our best, most consistent, physics view of reality]. Science gives us as much truth as we can see in a well lit test-tube.
    - senderista 9y ago
      Actually GR makes both geocentrism and heliocentrism "true". One is free to pick whatever coordinate system is most convenient to solve a given problem.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Mathematical simplicity is insufficient for truth in my epistemology. Sounds very Platonic.