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Comment by mattfenwick

I do agree with you that science doesn't show causation, but I think your interpretation of science is incorrect:

> Therefore, all scientific analysis is unverifiable.

I disagree. It's verified by experiment. (Here I'm using "verify" to mean that contradictions have not (yet) been found by experimental observation).

> Knowledge of the world is completely unjustified.

I disagree. Again, it's justified by experiment. If that's not enough for you, too bad, because that's all we have.

> Our immense presumption of consistency in world phenomena when we really have no basis for asserting uniformity of nature.

I disagree. This is only asserted insofar as it's 1) useful, and 2) justified by observation.

I don't think you understand the significance of scientific results. They don't say "at a fundamental, irreducible level, this is how <some system> operates." Rather, they're saying something more along the lines of "as far as we can tell, this is a description of how <some system> operates, but it's entirely possible that we're wrong. However, we don't have any data that shows that we're wrong (yet), and because this description is useful for understanding <some system>, we're going to use it."

We don't need to know how a system works at a fundamental level, if understanding it at a less-detailed level is useful. I do agree with you that we can't determine "actual causality", but we don't need to, if we can instead find a bunch of really good correlations. The problem is that people find lots of crappy correlations, and/or can't tell the difference between good and crappy correlations.

parent mattfenwick 12 years ago

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