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Either You're Missing The Point Or I Am

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Posted by Mario Dovalina on May 2, 2002 23:33:13 UTC

Faith would be that inductive reasoning is sufficient to solve a problem. You have reason to accept inductive reasoning, but this is reasoning pragmatic reasoning that doesn't establish that your predictions are true or even close to being true.......Well, we can throw out induction as unreliable (thus, destroying science), however this would be contrary to reason. We know the usefulness (pragmatic value) of induction, but we cannot show that this gives us truth or even approximate truth.

No, I don't agree. I don't understand why making the admission that induction is unreliable would destroy science. All it would do is admit that the answers science recieves are not absolute, which most everyone already knows. As I said before, science DOES make some assumptions about the universe, but ADMITS that they are assumptions. The religiously faithful do not. If you can propose a better or more reliable system that our current science in divining the nature of the universe I'd be glad to hear it. Your argument seems to be "Well, science isn't perfect, and neither is faith, so they're even in validity" and I can't buy that. I would suggest that the approach that minimizes the number of unjustified base truth statements would tend more in the right direction.

[core assumptions of science] Induction, inference to the best explanation, definition of an explanation, unobservables as inferred, unobservables as constructed, Occam's razor, naturalistic approach, operationalism, H-D method, causation, criteria of a good theory, etc, etc.

That's a pretty good list. Although, try as I might, I am incapable of envisioning a universe in which these principles do not hold in at least providing an estimation. Can you?

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