That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)
Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science.
I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.
Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
>It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means;
I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint.
>We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul.
Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts:
Any methods will do, it's the body of knowledge that is important. I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason), but we'd use it so long as it works.
>
> Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts [...] You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
It's human behavior & human preferences, what else could it be? We can watch which parts of the brain light up when doing morality (eg google brain fairness). Even monkeys have a sense of fairness (google). If birds could talk they'd tell you it's a "moral fact" that birds should protect their young. Morality is clearly hardwired through evolution[1].
To see how frustrating this is, imagine you're arguing with people who are sure CPUs work because of "machine spirits." You don't have to be a chip designer to point out obvious circuitry, energy requirements, changes in function due to differing structures/damage, etc but they'll just believe whatever they want without evidence.
[1] And biology reduces to physics. Read selfish gene etc if you want to know how morality evolved, but it's clear it did happen.
>Well no, we just need methods leading to verifiable (ie predictive) results
That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate. The philosophy of science and the scientific method is a very complicated (and unfinished) subject, and crass statements like this just won't cut it as serious claims about the nature of scientific investigation. If you're interested, the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy gives a good overview of some of these topics (or pick up a copy of "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge," or look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem)
> I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason)
Yes, if in that scenario we knew the reason intuition worked, that might make it rational to use intuition. But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?
Regarding the moral issue, you seem to be suggesting that (1) reduces to the fact that humans have a preference for not killing people (as far as I can tell, your vague references to "parts of the brain lighting up" aren't doing any work here, they're just decoration). But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here. (Unless you are willing to be a moral nihilist and believe that there are really no facts about what people should do, only facts about what they prefer to do.)
> That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate.
That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.
> But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?
We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.
> But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here.
They are statements about what people think people should do. If we all had brains like these [1] it would be morally normal to be a sociopath. Again it doesn't matter what you call it (moral nihilism), this is also empirically true.
>That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.
I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.
>We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.
Again, this seems completely irrelevant to the statement you've quoted. You're confusing a knowledge of how a method works with a knowledge of how chemical reactions work. The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time. You seem to be saying that deciding between theories by a coin toss would be scientific if it turned out to be effective (which it might, in principle). But surely effectiveness is not the only criterion we apply. We also require the methods used to be in some sense rational, although (as you would discover if you bothered to read the philosophy of science instead of sneering at it), it is very difficult to figure out exactly what this means.
>They are statements about what people think people should do.
I don't agree, I think they are simply statements about what people should do. Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct. (One can imagine a scenario in which everyone has brains which cause them to think that squares are circles, but that wouldn't imply that facts about geometry are merely facts about a consensus of human thought.) I'm not sure what you mean when you say "this is also empirically true." Are you suggesting that it has somehow been /empirically/ established that moral statements are statements about what people think people should do? I don't see which empirical facts about the brain could adjudicate between different positions regarding the nature of moral statements. I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts. There is no reason whatever to think that this is the case (and though you persistently assert that is is, you never bother to provide any), but this idea really seems to have captured your imagination.
>I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.
Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
> The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time.
They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening. When solving chemical equations, you must take into account atomic numbers, which they did long before knowing about atoms. There's no a priori reason why certain compounds must always be in certain proportions. All they knew is it worked well.
> Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct.
So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct? Geometry has real world consequences that don't change if brain structure changes. Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
> I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts.
It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes. If you claim moral beliefs aren't based on reality then clearly they're arbitrary.
>Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
Again, all of this is too vague to either agree with or disagree with. If you read the relevant philosophical literature, you'll find that it's very hard to say exactly what words like "predictive", "model", etc. should actually mean in this context. Do you mean that theories have to make verifiable predictions? Falsifiable predictions? What exactly do you mean by verifiability or falsifiability? Do you believe that observations can be made independently of theory? Do you agree with Quine that confirmation and refutation are holistic? To say that scientists attempt to construct predictive models is to say virtually nothing of any content. This is why it is not a good idea for scientists to parrot phrases like "verifiable", "observable", etc. without at least trying to get a grasp of some of the issues surrounding them.
>They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening.
No, that's not true. Their theories were based on constructing hypotheses and testing them (an oversimplication of course, but basically true). That is a rational method. The fact that they didn't know exactly what atomic numbers were doesn't make it any less rational. (After all, we still don't know exactly what atoms are.)
>So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct?
Their correspondence with the moral facts of the matter.
>Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
I don't know what this means, but I think you are confusing moral beliefs with moral facts.
>It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes.
The idea that all contentful statements reduce to statements about the outcome of experiment or observation is (again) essentially the one that the logical positivsts put forward. It turned out to be wrong, for reasons which are well documented for anyone who is interested.
Personally, I don't find it inconceivable at all that it's possible to make a statement about "this" reality without referring to an observation or experiment. "It is wrong to kill people for no reason" is clearly a statement pertaining to reality which has no connection with any particular observation or experiment.
> According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific.
Maybe I'm just using circular logic here, but the only way we know whether a method is effective is by testing it. Nevertheless, I don't think there's a working scientist out there who wouldn't want to trust a colleague's intuition (that we've already established as reliable) to try to do things we don't quite rationally understand yet. I think the key thing to remember is that ultimately, it has to be an effective means, and the way scientists figure out what is or isn't effective is by experiment.
I wasn't trying to make a point about the use of intuition, this was just a hypothetical example. I could just as well have constructed a hypothetical scenario in which, say, asking a five year old kid turns out to be the most effective method of investigating the world. Surely, even if this turned out to be an effective method, it would not be scientific.
You cannot name a single effective technique that's been shunned because it smells bad to a philosopher. Coincidence? Frankly if anyone tries that in any competitive field they'll lose market share, won't be able to publish, etc.
>You cannot name a single effective technique that's been shunned because it smells bad to a philosopher.
I'm not sure why I should need to do that, since I'm discussing a hypothetical scenario where a crazy method turns out to be effective. Are you saying that it /would/ be scientific to ask a five year old kid if it turned out to be effective? Or what?
Yes. You only say it's crazy because it doesn't work. Like all effective techniques, I don't see why it wouldn't be quite commonplace & eventually well understood.
>Yes. You only say it's crazy because it doesn't work.
How could I be saying that it's crazy because it doesn't work when I'm considering a hypothetical scenario in which it does work? That doesn't make any sense.
It's crazy because we can't construct even the hint of an explanation for why it should be an effective method. Of course, you might in turn imagine a scenario in which we succeed in constructing some kind of explanation -- in which case the method might be rational in addition to being effective -- but there is no guarantee that any such explanation could be constructed, and I am considering the scenario in which it can't.
In any case, in suggesting that scientists should not even be rational (or alternatively, in defining rationality purely in terms of outcomes), you are departing from the mainstream to such an extent that the burden of explanation is clearly on you here. You are certainly not stating a "basic fact" about the nature of science. I'm all for methodological liberalism, but you can't assess a method purely based on its outcomes.
Comments
That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)
Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science.
I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.
Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
>It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means;
I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint.
>We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul.
Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts:
(1) It is wrong to kill someone for no reason.
> The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective
Well no, we just need methods leading to verifiable (ie predictive) results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
Any methods will do, it's the body of knowledge that is important. I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason), but we'd use it so long as it works.
>
> Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts [...] You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
It's human behavior & human preferences, what else could it be? We can watch which parts of the brain light up when doing morality (eg google brain fairness). Even monkeys have a sense of fairness (google). If birds could talk they'd tell you it's a "moral fact" that birds should protect their young. Morality is clearly hardwired through evolution[1].
To see how frustrating this is, imagine you're arguing with people who are sure CPUs work because of "machine spirits." You don't have to be a chip designer to point out obvious circuitry, energy requirements, changes in function due to differing structures/damage, etc but they'll just believe whatever they want without evidence.
[1] And biology reduces to physics. Read selfish gene etc if you want to know how morality evolved, but it's clear it did happen.
>Well no, we just need methods leading to verifiable (ie predictive) results
That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate. The philosophy of science and the scientific method is a very complicated (and unfinished) subject, and crass statements like this just won't cut it as serious claims about the nature of scientific investigation. If you're interested, the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy gives a good overview of some of these topics (or pick up a copy of "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge," or look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem)
> I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason)
Yes, if in that scenario we knew the reason intuition worked, that might make it rational to use intuition. But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?
Regarding the moral issue, you seem to be suggesting that (1) reduces to the fact that humans have a preference for not killing people (as far as I can tell, your vague references to "parts of the brain lighting up" aren't doing any work here, they're just decoration). But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here. (Unless you are willing to be a moral nihilist and believe that there are really no facts about what people should do, only facts about what they prefer to do.)
> That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate.
That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.
> But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?
We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.
> But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here.
They are statements about what people think people should do. If we all had brains like these [1] it would be morally normal to be a sociopath. Again it doesn't matter what you call it (moral nihilism), this is also empirically true.
[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/
>That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.
I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.
>We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.
Again, this seems completely irrelevant to the statement you've quoted. You're confusing a knowledge of how a method works with a knowledge of how chemical reactions work. The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time. You seem to be saying that deciding between theories by a coin toss would be scientific if it turned out to be effective (which it might, in principle). But surely effectiveness is not the only criterion we apply. We also require the methods used to be in some sense rational, although (as you would discover if you bothered to read the philosophy of science instead of sneering at it), it is very difficult to figure out exactly what this means.
>They are statements about what people think people should do.
I don't agree, I think they are simply statements about what people should do. Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct. (One can imagine a scenario in which everyone has brains which cause them to think that squares are circles, but that wouldn't imply that facts about geometry are merely facts about a consensus of human thought.) I'm not sure what you mean when you say "this is also empirically true." Are you suggesting that it has somehow been /empirically/ established that moral statements are statements about what people think people should do? I don't see which empirical facts about the brain could adjudicate between different positions regarding the nature of moral statements. I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts. There is no reason whatever to think that this is the case (and though you persistently assert that is is, you never bother to provide any), but this idea really seems to have captured your imagination.
>I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.
Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
> The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time.
They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening. When solving chemical equations, you must take into account atomic numbers, which they did long before knowing about atoms. There's no a priori reason why certain compounds must always be in certain proportions. All they knew is it worked well.
> Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct.
So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct? Geometry has real world consequences that don't change if brain structure changes. Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
> I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts.
It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes. If you claim moral beliefs aren't based on reality then clearly they're arbitrary.
>Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
Again, all of this is too vague to either agree with or disagree with. If you read the relevant philosophical literature, you'll find that it's very hard to say exactly what words like "predictive", "model", etc. should actually mean in this context. Do you mean that theories have to make verifiable predictions? Falsifiable predictions? What exactly do you mean by verifiability or falsifiability? Do you believe that observations can be made independently of theory? Do you agree with Quine that confirmation and refutation are holistic? To say that scientists attempt to construct predictive models is to say virtually nothing of any content. This is why it is not a good idea for scientists to parrot phrases like "verifiable", "observable", etc. without at least trying to get a grasp of some of the issues surrounding them.
>They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening.
No, that's not true. Their theories were based on constructing hypotheses and testing them (an oversimplication of course, but basically true). That is a rational method. The fact that they didn't know exactly what atomic numbers were doesn't make it any less rational. (After all, we still don't know exactly what atoms are.)
>So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct?
Their correspondence with the moral facts of the matter.
>Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
I don't know what this means, but I think you are confusing moral beliefs with moral facts.
>It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes.
The idea that all contentful statements reduce to statements about the outcome of experiment or observation is (again) essentially the one that the logical positivsts put forward. It turned out to be wrong, for reasons which are well documented for anyone who is interested.
Personally, I don't find it inconceivable at all that it's possible to make a statement about "this" reality without referring to an observation or experiment. "It is wrong to kill people for no reason" is clearly a statement pertaining to reality which has no connection with any particular observation or experiment.
Physics does not reduce to atomic physics, nor science to physics, nor life to science.
> According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific.
Maybe I'm just using circular logic here, but the only way we know whether a method is effective is by testing it. Nevertheless, I don't think there's a working scientist out there who wouldn't want to trust a colleague's intuition (that we've already established as reliable) to try to do things we don't quite rationally understand yet. I think the key thing to remember is that ultimately, it has to be an effective means, and the way scientists figure out what is or isn't effective is by experiment.
I wasn't trying to make a point about the use of intuition, this was just a hypothetical example. I could just as well have constructed a hypothetical scenario in which, say, asking a five year old kid turns out to be the most effective method of investigating the world. Surely, even if this turned out to be an effective method, it would not be scientific.
You cannot name a single effective technique that's been shunned because it smells bad to a philosopher. Coincidence? Frankly if anyone tries that in any competitive field they'll lose market share, won't be able to publish, etc.
>You cannot name a single effective technique that's been shunned because it smells bad to a philosopher.
I'm not sure why I should need to do that, since I'm discussing a hypothetical scenario where a crazy method turns out to be effective. Are you saying that it /would/ be scientific to ask a five year old kid if it turned out to be effective? Or what?
Yes. You only say it's crazy because it doesn't work. Like all effective techniques, I don't see why it wouldn't be quite commonplace & eventually well understood.
>Yes. You only say it's crazy because it doesn't work.
How could I be saying that it's crazy because it doesn't work when I'm considering a hypothetical scenario in which it does work? That doesn't make any sense.
It's crazy because we can't construct even the hint of an explanation for why it should be an effective method. Of course, you might in turn imagine a scenario in which we succeed in constructing some kind of explanation -- in which case the method might be rational in addition to being effective -- but there is no guarantee that any such explanation could be constructed, and I am considering the scenario in which it can't.
In any case, in suggesting that scientists should not even be rational (or alternatively, in defining rationality purely in terms of outcomes), you are departing from the mainstream to such an extent that the burden of explanation is clearly on you here. You are certainly not stating a "basic fact" about the nature of science. I'm all for methodological liberalism, but you can't assess a method purely based on its outcomes.
> ... but there is no guarantee that any such explanation could be constructed, and I am considering the scenario in which it can't.
Are you serious?
Yes. From the fact that a method works, it doesn't follow that there must be an explanation for why it works.