Inference and its role in NS (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, January 14, 2011, 03:59 (5061 days ago) @ dhw

My thanks to Romansh for some useful definitions and statements. There are just two I'd like to comment on:
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> 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.
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> 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.)
> -Because a scientific theory is NOT what you describe here. The definition used by scientists and philosophers alike is what I've said several times today: A hypothesis that has been tested repeatedly with the same result. A theory as defined by scientists--is not a conjecture, but an explanation that has been repeatedly verified. What the general public is typically confused by, is the media's use of "theory" as hypothesis. A hypothesis is what you describe above, not a theory. Gravity is still considered a theory (though there is some laws attached to it.) Evolution is a theory. The Big Bang is a theory. -What the general public doesn't get is the transitory nature of a theory. A theory is literally--the best explanation that anyone has come up with that describes the greatest portion of the data. (Not all.) Hence why David accepts (not belives in) the theory of evolution. He takes aim at portions that he finds inept or incomplete. --> ROMANSH: There is no need for belief in a scientist's world. Replicates and the concepts of precision and accuracy would be unnecessary otherwise.
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> 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.
> -My response to Romansh here is similar. -> 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:
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> "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." [...] 
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> "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?"-Again, the public seems incapable of handling the necessarily transitory nature of scientific explanations. We put statistical faith in science, but science is not now (and has never been) about finding final answers to questions. Only naivete leads us down this path.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"