(July 20, 2016 at 1:16 pm)Stimbo Wrote: If a cause, supernatural or otherwise, has any effect on the natural world at all, that effect has to be detectable by definition. That puts it squarely in the purview of science. Otherwise what justification can you possibly have for suspecting it's even there?
Fair enough. At the same time, 'Science' is not a monolith. Each domain of inquiry (science), from linguistics and economics to mathematics, biology and physics has its own methodology. What tends to happen is people try to apply the tools and methods of one science, like physics, to other fields of knowledge, like semiotics.
Your reply seems to imply that all causes are reducible to small-scale primitives. That may or may not be the case. It's an epistemological assumption. It could very well be that the best explanations for some effects are irreducible large-scale causes. These would be invisible to methods designed to find small-scale primitives. In semiotics, meaning is not reducible to linguistic primitives, phonemes. Sentences, for example, get their meaning from a transcending context. That is just one example of an event, a person's interpretation of a sentence, that cannot be explained by reducing it to small-scale causal primitives like physicists do.
