I think that's an interesting approach. For the record, I absolutely share your healthy suspicion that health sciences need a bit (much) more hand holding than

I think that's an interesting approach. For the record, I absolutely share your healthy suspicion that health sciences need a bit (much) more hand holding than some (most) other disciplines. To needle you slightly further, though, I'd recommend you consider John Snow's investigation into cholera clusters near certain water sources in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak#Investigation_by_John_Snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb... What should we make of that? Ok, more generally... I'm glad you're giving this some thought, because this line of inquiry (or something like it) really affected the way I think about science and knowledge. It's an incredibly rewarding line to go down, though not entirely free of frustrating dead ends. If you find this stuff interesting, you might want to poke around a bit in 20th century philosophy. There are some (needlessly lengthy) summaries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, esp. under "Logical Empiricism." I hesitate to recommend that, though, it's long on history and short on significant arguments and though-provoking examples. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by Quine profoundly affected the way I think about all of this. It's not an easy piece, I had to read it a few times and kept turning it over in my head for months. At first I thought it was nonsense. Then I thought it was just wrong. Then it sort of wormed its way into my head and changed a few core things I believed about knowledge. Or reorganized them. Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, and Wittgenstein all had profound contributions here too. At the end of Quine's paper he says that White basically said everything important on this already in "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism." I haven't read that, but maybe it's the accessible version. One could hope. http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readings/White%20-%20Analytic%20and%20Synthetic%20Untenable.pdf http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R...