Midgets on stilts

DM: It's a bit more striking to see someone who is so utterly out of touch with reality. The next time you have a medical condition, I'd like to see where your skepticism and scientific anti-realism go...into the crapper.

SH: Danny, if you think for one moment that this is a defeater for my position, then you haven’t given it very much thought.

There are at least three things wrong with your comeback, of which I mention one right here and save the other two for later.

All we need for a scientific theory to work is for there to be a regular conjunction between one phenomenal event and another.

From this we ordinarily infer a cause/effect relationship, although that isn’t necessary.

And the appearances can be at several removes from the underlying and unobservable reality.

Unless you happen to be a naïve realist who believes that objects really are smaller at a distance, and oars really bend in water, then even you will have to admit a discrepancy between appearance and reality.

And the problem is that all we have are appearances to go by. We can artificially enhance our senses, but that merely introduces another filter. It presents us with just another appearance.

Danny’s position isn’t much different from the flat-earther. After all, the earth looks flat to the earth-bound observer.

DM: Call me a pragmatist about scientific methodology, seeing it as a tool. If it works to produce things for us that meet our needs (eg medicine), then we use it until better tools come along.

SH: Notice how Danny has retreated from his original position. His original position was predicated on the alethic progressivity of science: reliable “knowledge,” “falsifiable” and “unfalsifiable.

Now, however, the question of truth has suddenly dropped out of the equation.

To speak of the scientific method as a tool sounds a lot like instrumentalism rather than realism.

DM: So far, your theology and philosophizing has done squat for the human race as far as meeting needs and saving lives and mass-producing food and etc. etc. etc.

Even if that were the case, it’s irrelevant to the truth-value, or lack thereof, of scientific theorizing.

DM: Hardly. You don't know my views on the philosophy of science and demarcation. I haven't bothered to engage with you on it, as I stated long ago, since you're a scientific anti-realist.

SH: Actually, Danny has expressed a philosophy of science in the very course of this exchange.

DM: As I said there, why cast pearls before swine? Why get into contextual disputes with someone who doesn't subscribe to any of the contexts?

You always want to move the ball back into your court, because it's the only one with the 4' rim. Thus, making "slam dunks" on the court of scientific anti-realism is your bag.

SH: Danny’s persistent problem is that he thinks he can make a straight-line appeal to the scientific evidence without bothering to ask himself, much less answer for himself, what sort of cognitive access the percipient can have to the scientific evidence in the first place.

Before you can appeal to observables, much less unobservables (strings, elementary particles, the prehistoric past), you must deal with the observer. That’s why we can’t move on until this preliminary question is addressed.

DM: Why should I bother distinguishing Popper's change of views on evolutionary theory and falsifiability with someone who thinks that such knowledge goes through "too many layers" of perception to be real?

SH: Fine, ignore Popper and stick with the veil of perception. What’s your way around the veil of perception?

DM: As Calvindude has hinted at here, some theories are later found to be "false". What neither of you in your theorizing allow for is that when the prior theories are shown to be false (viz. creationism by evolution) the new theory must accomodate the observational data of the old, as well as provide a better explanation for other phenomena.

SH: A couple of problems with this claim:

1.It confuses the theory with the significance attached to the theory. Both Einstein and Bohr could agree on the nuts-and-bolts of quantum theory, but differ over its significance; both Penrose and Hawking could agree on the basics of cosmology, but differ over its significance.

You can assign either a realist or antirealist interpretation to the very same theory.

If you—as a realist—are going to say that a given theory is a true description of reality, then I—as an antirealist—will simply say that you attach a false significance to the theory.

2.You also sidestep the question of how, in the history of science, contradictory theories can both be successful. That’s a problem for realism.

DM: n this sense, scientific theories are evolving, but they are selected for by their utility and scope.

SH: Notice his choice of words. Selected for “utility” and “scope” rather than veracity.

DM: You spent a lot of time talking about your analogy between a CD's encoding of a live performance and the performance itself. The binary data in a CD is a language which can be correlated to the frequencies of the music. What strikes me as odd is that, as observations are made through layers of perception, you fail to argue that there is some fundamental disconnect between the "language" of perception and that of reality. You simply posit that these layers exist (which I don't deny), and that by their existence, a correlation to reality is somehow not itself dependable as knowledge.

SH: Nice try, but as usual I’m at least one step ahead of you since I’ve already addressed that line of objection on several occasions.

1.Yes, we use our senses to perceive our senses. That, of itself, doesn’t imply that our senses are reliable in a truth-conducive sense.

A color-blind man must rely on his defective sense of perception. That’s all he has to go by.

2.What you fail to see (pardon the pun) is that I’m critiquing scientific realism from within.

So, yes, for purposes of an internal critique, I assume a perceptual viewpoint. And given that very perspective, the ironic result is that indirect perception is the best that we can salvage by taking perception as our point of departure and point of reference.

3.Since, however, using the senses to perceive the senses is a circular exercise, then the illusory objectivity of such self-referential descriptions would not, when you make allowance for that imponderable, draw us any closer to reality in the raw, but removes us by yet another degree of separation from reality in the raw.

Like a man sewn into a VR suit, that’s his only frame of reference even if he knows it’s fictive. Subtract that and you end up with less rather than more.

DM: If our brains fundamentally change the nature of reality, there is absolutely no way for us to know it. Likewise, there is absolutely no way for us to prove it false. This is an unfalsifiable concept, like all of your 4' rim court abstractions.

SH:

1.I’m a dualist. I believe that dualism is demonstrable on introspective grounds. There is more to knowledge, including self-knowledge, than sensory perception.

2.There is no way for the percipient, left to his own devices, to escape his subjectivity and compare appearance with reality.

But divine revelation can supply an Archimedean point of comparison and contrast.

You, however, have sealed yourself away from that resource, like a clam. So you’re self-exiled to your epistemic shell. Hope you enjoy the view in the dark.

DM: To continue my tirade on the futility of philosophy, see Babinski's excellent collection of quotes here.

SH: Those who mock the philosophy of science are still operating with their own homegrown philosophy of science. The only difference is that theirs is a philosophically inept philosophy of science.

If a creationist were to talk in this country-bumpkin fashion, he’d be greeted with intellectual scorn.

But it’s okay to be a country-bumpkin just as long as you’re a Darwinian hayseed.