Inference and its role in NS (General)

by dhw, Thursday, January 13, 2011, 14:39 (4873 days ago) @ romansh

My thanks to Romansh for some useful definitions and statements. There are just two I'd like to comment on:-ROMANSH: I can't remember who said/intimated, that a scientific Law and Theory are synonymous it's just that a Law can said in pithy statement. These have lots of evidence to support statements, have stood the test of time and even remain Laws and theories when evidence has been found to show them as inacurate - eg Newton's Laws.-There seems to be a great deal of controversy over what a scientific theory actually is, and also over what it should be, but as a non-scientist I don't understand why scientific theory should be differently defined from any other kind of theory ... i.e. a set of ideas which explains certain facets of reality but the truth of which has not been proved. If it had, would it not be fact instead of theory? On the other hand, when is a proven fact not a proven fact? (See quotes from the New Yorker article below.)-ROMANSH: There is no need for belief in a scientist's world. Replicates and the concepts of precision and accuracy would be unnecessary otherwise.-I don't see how scientists can operate without belief, and experience tells us that scientists, like everyone else, have difficulty drawing a line between belief and knowledge. Perhaps here too there is a gap between what science is and what science should be.-I hope you've read the article from the New Yorker to which David (12 January at 15.17) has drawn our attention under "The limitations of science". If not, here are two highly relevant quotes:
 
"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology." [...] 

"For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?"