The afterlife

Black Swan wrote: »

There are substantial differences in the religious faith paradigm and that of scientists exhibiting confidence in knowledge obtained through the scientific method. Religion and science do not share the same epistemological status, and to claim that "No knowledge of any kind is possible without faith in something" does not establish equivalence between religious faith and scientific confidence, or the knowledge obtained thereof, and to claim that they are equivalent in epistemological meaning was terribly misleading.

How fortunate, then, that I advanced no such claim.

Different epistemologies proceed from different axioms. None of the axioms can be proven (duh!) but it does not follow that they are all "of equal status', except to the trivial extent that they are all unproven. We have to make decisions about which epistemologies we will employ (if we ever want to claim to know anything at all), and this requires us to evaluate different epistemologies, their strengths, their weaknesses, their fitness to be employed in this or that field of enquiry, etc, etc. We do in fact make choices between alternative epistemologies all the time, and I suspect for the most part we do not examine closely the basis on which we do so.

In the field of natural science, the epistemology employed by scientists enables us (given its assumptions) to draw conclusions that are attended with a very high degree of certainty. Sadly, other fields of enquiry - ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, lit. crit., "should I marry her?" - are not similarly blessed. This does not mean that the epistemology of natural science should be brought to bear in these fields. The axioms which prove so reliable and useful in the field of natural science may be less reliable, less useful or even completely irrelevant in other fields of enquiry. So the epistemology I employ to make, say, ethical decisions may not produce such certain or reliable results as the scientific method produces, but it is still nevertheless a better epistemology to employ in that context than the scientific method would be. Are the two epistemologies "equivalent"? I don't even know what that question means.

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Black Swan. I don’t want to pick up on all your points, becasue the conversation will get too sprawling (for me, at any rate), but if I may just pick up on a couple:

Black Swan wrote: »

Yes, science does not prove anything; science only suggests. The natural sciences have more precise and valid forms of measurement than the social, behavioral, educational, business, and related disciplines; i.e., they can be more objective and less subjective than the social "sciences."

This is inherent in the nature of the social sciences, I think. For me, the dividing line between tne natural sciences and the social sciences is that the subjects of the latter include us ourselves; our minds, our thoughts, our actions, our choices. And these are inherently subjective factors. This isn’t a weakness or a fault in the social sciences; it’s just their defining characteristic.

Black Swan wrote: »

Disciplines tend to reduce or eliminate such "choices between alternative epistemologies" by specifying appropriate research frameworks; e.g., biology may differ from chemistry as to their specific application of the scientific method. Of greater influence as to method are the RFPs, where only those that comply with a specified framework may be funded.

Disciplines do this, but I wasn’t thinking of disciplines so much as of individuals. I employ different epistemologies when addressing the questions “why won’t my car start?”, “why do I feel so low today?”, “how am I to deal with this problematic behaviour that my child is exhibiting?” and “how do I make [difficult ethical choice]?”. We all do, and we do this not (usually) as the result of training in any discipline.

Black Swan wrote: »

August Comte, et al, attempted to employ the scientific method to disciplines outside the natural, later relabeling of many disciplines as sciences (e.g., social and behavioural sciences). Unfortunately, the theories, assumptions, and measures appear to have fallen below the rigour of the natural sciences in terms of objectivity and validity. Nevertheless, the attempts away from subjectivity towards scientific objectivity by these social and behavioural disciplines appear to have more merit than armchair opinions.

Ah, maybe not. This isn’t a simple binary.

Consider a social science like, say economics. This is the study of the choices people make about the allocation of scarce resources. Obviously, it’s possible to make reliable empirical observations about relevant objective facts ; when the price of spuds rose by X% consumption fell by Y%. And if we have enough such empirical observations we can start to hypothesize explanations, and to draw conclusions which enable us to make predictions. The problem is that our predictions aren’t based just on the empirical data; they also rest on certain axioms, one of which typically is that people are rational and self-interested. To the extent that people are mostly rational and mostly self-interested, our explanations and our predictions may hold mostly good. But we’re still faced with two problems; first, what rational self-interested people view as being in their own interest may not align with what I view as being in their interest and, secondly, sometimes people are either not rational or not self-interested.

The result of this is that if my prediction lead me to expect X in a certain situation and instead Y eventuates, this isn’t necessarily fatal to the validity of my prediction in a way that it would be in, say, physics. The unexpected result could the outcome of either of the factors just mentioned. This shows that my methodology doesn’t - and probably can’t - produce results which are as reliable as the results that the methodologies employed in physics can produce. But this doesn’t mean that my methodology isn’t substantially reliable; reliable to an extremely useful degree. And it certainly doesn’t allow us to conclude that my methodology has no more merit than armchair opinions.

(Not sure how we got here from a consideration of the afterlife!)

I don't believe in god or an afterlife but I used to, and when I did I sort of figured god didn't so much create the universe as become the universe. God didn't say, "Let there be light" but said,"Let me be light"