(January 16, 2019 at 6:01 pm)bennyboy Wrote: If science is about making objective observations, I say you cannot do a science of mind, because mind cannot be observed at all.
Of course we can observe our own minds directly. First person accounts form a useful part of scientific studies, especially when scientists have large samplings which are compared to measurements of brain activity.
All sorts of things can't be observed directly by science, yet scientists can assemble excellent guesses by means of their careful detective work on available evidence, including proxies. That's how scientists reconstructed ancient climates for instance.
This is perhaps my main objection to philosophical approaches to knowledge, and this problem seems to go all the way back to the Greeks: philosophers think knowledge must be certain, while in fact our best knowledge always seems to come with probabilities. Quantum mechanics is accurate to how many decimal places? Yet it states explicitly exactly where you have to draw a line between what you can know and what you can't.
