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Anonymous
Failure of the scientific method 2017-03-08 05:46:05 Post No. 8730536
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Failure of the scientific method 2017-03-08 05:46:05 Post No. 8730536
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I know that as the science board, the scientific method is probably lauded. I would agree that it is probably the most important intellectual creation besides religion and philosophy in the history of humanity, but I wanted to hear your thoughts on failure of the scientific method, specifically the scenario where truth occurs but is not observable, and thus no correct conclusion can come from science as we know it.
It seems to me that there are some events or "truths" occurring that are not able to be falsified. For example, there's a video somewhere on YouTube where a guy is giving a talk about how, in the future, the galaxies will spread out due to entropy and space filling, and will be unobservable due to distance. The point is that our future humans ( if they lose record of the existence of other galaxies) will look into the sky, detect no other galaxies out in space, and will come to a conclusion that we are the only galaxy in the universe. They will use the scientific method perfectly and come to an incorrect conclusion.
Is this a failure of the scientific method, and is there anything we can do about this failure? How do we come to know truth if our powers of observation lead us to the wrong conclusions? Is trusting in the scientific method correct, incorrect, or perfectly justifiable if we acknowledge it's limits?
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>>8730536
>The point is that our future humans ( if they lose record of the existence of other galaxies) will look into the sky, detect no other galaxies out in space, and will come to a conclusion that we are the only galaxy in the universe. They will use the scientific method perfectly and come to an incorrect conclusion.
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
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>>8730539
This is true, but I'd bet that many would become galaxy agnostics, acknowledging the possibility but accepting that it's improbable. It's similar to the existence of a deity, it's impossible to prove or disprove existence, but there's no evidence of existence.
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>>8730536
That's a large part of the reason methodologists don't use the hypothetico deductive method anymore.
Falsifiability, as a standard of science, has ostensibly been dead for the passed fifty years now, but for some reason that fact hasn't caught up to your average scientist yet.
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>>8730561
I'm not a scientist, so how do modern scientists and empiricists come to conclusions?
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>>8730536
It's not a failure of the scientific method.
Our powers of observation are all we have to work with.
Trusting in the scientific method is perfectly justifiable if we acknowledge it's limits.
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The future scenario would not be wrong if they claimed there was only one galaxy in the universe - that is the only answer given the information available, and even if it isn't falsifiable its still the most likely available theory they would have
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>>8730605
It's objectively wrong though. Galaxies would exist in the future scenario, even though the future people couldn't observe them. Just because they don't realize truth or existence doesn't make that existence cease to exist.
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>>8730605
they could probably deduce the existence of other galaxies using other information like fusion, gravity, the age of the universe
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>>8730610
What if we take it as the existence of other galaxies as completely unobservable, either through eyesight, or through radio observation, or gravitational effects, or through residual material, etc...
The problem is that the existence of something that is not observable is a lapse in the scientific method.
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>>8730617
>The problem is that the existence of something that is not observable is a lapse in the scientific method
why? Just because you don't see (in any sense) some thing it doesn't means you have to rule it out of excistence
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