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From: Zerkon on 6 Jul 2010 06:52
On Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:11:53 -0700, Immortalist wrote:

> Attitudes to science range all the way from uncritical admiration at one
> extreme, through distrust, resentment, and envy, to denigration and
> outright hostility at the other.
>
> Scientific inquiry is continuous with the most ordinary of everyday
> empirical inquiry. There is no mode of inference, no "scientific
> method," exclusive to the sciences and guaranteed to produce true,
> probably true, more nearly true, or more empirically adequate, results.
> As Percy Bridgman put it, "the scientific method, as far as it is a
> method, is nothing more than doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no
> holds barred." And, as far as it is a method, it is what historians or
> detectives or investigative journalists or the rest of us do when we
> really want to find something out: make an informed conjecture about the
> possible explanation of a puzzling phenomenon, check how it stands up to
> the best evidence we can get, and then use our judgment whether to
> accept it, more or less tentatively, or modify, refine, or replace it.
>
> Science has managed to discover a great deal about the world and how it
> works, but it is a thoroughly human enterprise, messy, fallible, and
> fumbling; and rather than using a uniquely rational method unavailable
> to other inquirers, it is continuous with the most ordinary of empirical
> inquiry, "nothing more than a refinement of our everyday thinking," as
> Einstein once put it. There is no distinctive, timeless "scientific
> nethod," only the modes of inference and procedures common to all
> serious inquiry, and the multifarious "helps" the sciences have
> gradually devised to refine our natural human cognitive capacities: to
> amplify the senses, stretch the imagination, extend reasoning power, and
> sustain respect for evidence.
>
> The core standards of good evidence and well-conducted inquiry are not
> internal to the sciences, but common to empirical inquiry of every kind.
> In judging where science has succeeded and where it has failed, in what
> areas and at what times it has done better and in what worse, we are
> appealing to the standards by which we judge the solidity of empirical
> beliefs, or the rigor and thoroughness of empirical inquiry, generally.
> Often, to be sure, only a specialist can judge the weight of evidence or
> the thoroughness of precautions against experimental error, etc.; for
> such judgments require a broad and detailed knowledge of background
> theory, and a familiarity with technical vocabulary, not easily
> available to the lay person. Nevertheless, respect for evidence, care in
> weighing it, and persistence in seeking it out, so far from being
> exclusively scientific desiderata, arc the standards by which we judge
> all inquirers, detectives, historians, investigative journalists, etc.,
> as well as scientists. In short, the sciences are not logically
> privileged.
>
> Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism - Susan
> Haack
> http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Science-Within-Reason-Scientism-
Cynicism/dp/1591021170

This really isn't the base upon which science needs to be defended now.
This excerpt treats the method of science as if it were operating in the
idealized and traditional vacuuming of "truth for it's own sake". Truth
being or not being ethically neutral. Irregardless, what is not neutral
is economic necessities, department politics, social stature, and juicy
graduate students. Now THIS is "messy, fallible, and fumbling"

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