RE: Pull up a chair
March 18, 2014 at 1:23 am
(This post was last modified: March 18, 2014 at 1:46 am by Alex K.)
(March 17, 2014 at 6:45 pm)discipulus Wrote:(March 17, 2014 at 6:42 pm)Alex K Wrote: It has proven to be reliable.
science is reliable because it has proven to be reliable...
Fail...
Try again, and please no tautologies.
Good morning, sorry for the delay, I must have dozed off there for a few hours. Good thing I was in bed.
Ah gloating wannabe philosopher for breakfast, hmm!
Sorry, that's not a tautology. You meant to say: hey, but you use the scientific method to find whether the scientific method is reliable (aha!). And I say: in a sense that is correct, for what I can check is self-consistency of its findings. It cannot in principle be possible to prove it correct in any way because there is the possibility of solipsism. However, the scientific method is not an artificial construct entirely separate from our everyday experience, it is a slight formalization of the mode of operation in which you live your life. To deny it on grounds of our inability to prove its validity from first principles therefore has the profound consequence of sliding into solipsism. The hypothesis "the scientific method is unreliable" is unfalsifiable, but living your life accepting it means denying the reality of your life. You can do it, but there is no reason to do it. Now I understand that you can't actually want to accept it (the hypothesis of unreliability), because you are arguing with us. Thus, you want not only to reject it, given that we reject it as well, you call this move faith-based. In a philosophical piggy back, you then declare that 1. we are no better than the theists, 2. because we live faith based lifes. The latter is true, but almost trivially so, as we are forced to make working assumptions in order to act (the point of your schtick is calling those faith)- the former is not, for you either make a huge unnecessary additional assumption for which there is no evidence in the sense of the scientific method which you already accept, or you want to take theism as the alternative, in which case you deny all of reality and this conversation does not take place.
Your next stop from here is presuppositionalism, have fun
