DJ
An excellent post — well reasoned and thought out, informative, and without excessive emotional baggage.
I thought you might want to know that the reason I bang so hard on empiricism here at SDMB is the same reason that I bang so hard on liberalism. There is a tacit assumption, because of the sheer number of materialists here, that an empirical epistemology is somehow superior to any other. Few necessarily say this, but there are so many who rely upon it to the exclusion of all else that it needs to be beaten down before it wraps itself around the whole place like Kudzu.
Empricism has its place, and there isn’t any mystery to it. For whatever that may be falsified, there is no more reliable and appropriate method of gaining knowledge than empiricism. If a statement is made that has the potential to be proven false, then the appropriate way to proceed is to test it scientifically.
But here is a critical point that so often gets lost among materialists who are overly giddy about empiricism — not everything that tests as not false is true, and not everything that tests as false is not true. (Wait! Bear with me!) Yes, in first-order logic and its derivatives we have a contradiction when we say A and Not A, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m not saying that something can be both true and false at the same time; rather, I’m saying that something can be true upon some condition or circumstance and false upon some other.
Psychoanalytical theories are unscientific for precisely the reason mentioned in your Skeptics Dictionary — they are not capable of being formulated into falsifiable hypotheses. These are exactly the theories that Popper himself dealt with as he formulated the modern scientific method and became the first to describe the distinction between science and pseudo-science. Does this make them not true? No. It merely makes them not necessarily false, because the only thing science (empiricism) can tell us is whether a particular hypothesis is false. All this means is that psychoanalytical theories are not of interest to science. Nothing more. Testing them requires some other epistemology.
Keep in mind that empiricism tests only synthetic knowledge; that is, knowledge that is synthesized from experience and observation. There are many true statements that science cannot test: 2 + 2 = 4, for example. Science cannot test it because it requires a presumption that is not testable, namely the presumption of induction. Note that to prove 2 + 2 = 4 requires an entirely different epistemology (logic), and the acceptance without proof that for every n, there exists a successor n + 1. The sort of knowledge that science cannot test is analytic (as opposed to synthetic).
To expect that science and technology unilaterally will one day discover every truth is naive. First of all, science itself relies on other epistemologies so routinely that it is often forgotten that it does so. It relies on logic to formulate a proper hypothesis for testing. It relies on revelation to formulate ideas to state hypotheses about. It relies on imagination to tie together result sets from unrelated experiments. It relies on statistics to collate result sets into meaningful interpretations. And it relies on subjective experience to help formulate the best experiment.
Second, it is a mistake to extrapolate a scientific finding of not-false into a logical finding of true. For example, you can test Newtonian laws of force and momentum to a fare-thee-well and satisfy yourself that they are not false. But if you then presume that they are true, you will be lost and disillusioned when you attempt to apply their principles to objects travelling at or near the speed of light or to objects at subatomic scales. It isn’t that Einstein proved Newton wrong, but rather that he proved him incomplete. Newtonian “truths” did not account for certain other contexts.
Lastly, science is based upon a principle that itself cannot be tested scientifically. Just as no hypothesis may be formed to test the veracity of psychoanalysis, so no hypothesis may be formed to test the veracity of falsifiablity. If you accept falsifiablity as a right principle, then you do so as a conscious choice and without proof.
I really don’t mean to bash empiricism, but let’s just be careful to prioritize it properly. It has a place, but it does not have every place. It is useful for many things, but it is not useful for everything. It can reveal what is false in a given circumstance, but it can never reveal what is true under any circumstance.
Once again, thanks for your post. SDMB is richer for it.
