It seems that the matters you’re arguing that scientists disagree on are all ones where we cannot, at least by means anyone’s come up with yet, discriminate between options by use of empiricism.
The questions they disagree on may or may not be “philosophical,” depending on how you define your terms, but they’re questions that scientists are not currently able to resolve by doing science to them.
The observation that scientists disagree on matters that they cannot resolve with science doesn’t detract from the argument that the process of science is useful for building consensuses. If anything it supports it, since we can see that scientists do not tend to converge on consensuses on questions they aren’t able to address with science.
The observation that scientists disagree on matters that they cannot resolve with science doesn’t detract from the argument that the process of science is useful for building consensuses.
Agreed. It’s not that scientists universally distrust human rationality, while philosophers universally trust it. Both groups regularly subject their own reasoning faculties to tests and to distrust. (And both also need to rely at least somewhat on human reasoning, since one can only fairly conclude that a kind of reasoning is flawed by reasoning one’s way toward that conclusion. Even purely ‘empirical’ or ‘factual’ questions require some amount of interpretive work.)
The reason philosophers seem to disagree more than scientists is very simple, and it’s the same reason physicists trying to expand the Standard Model disagree more than physicists working within the Standard Model: Because there’s a lack of intersubjectively accessible data. Without such data for calibration, different theoretical physicists’ inferences, intuitions, and pattern-matching faculties in general will get relatively diverse results, even if their methodologies are quite commendable.
It seems that the matters you’re arguing that scientists disagree on are all ones where we cannot, at least by means anyone’s come up with yet, discriminate between options by use of empiricism.
The questions they disagree on may or may not be “philosophical,” depending on how you define your terms, but they’re questions that scientists are not currently able to resolve by doing science to them.
The observation that scientists disagree on matters that they cannot resolve with science doesn’t detract from the argument that the process of science is useful for building consensuses. If anything it supports it, since we can see that scientists do not tend to converge on consensuses on questions they aren’t able to address with science.
Agreed. It’s not that scientists universally distrust human rationality, while philosophers universally trust it. Both groups regularly subject their own reasoning faculties to tests and to distrust. (And both also need to rely at least somewhat on human reasoning, since one can only fairly conclude that a kind of reasoning is flawed by reasoning one’s way toward that conclusion. Even purely ‘empirical’ or ‘factual’ questions require some amount of interpretive work.)
The reason philosophers seem to disagree more than scientists is very simple, and it’s the same reason physicists trying to expand the Standard Model disagree more than physicists working within the Standard Model: Because there’s a lack of intersubjectively accessible data. Without such data for calibration, different theoretical physicists’ inferences, intuitions, and pattern-matching faculties in general will get relatively diverse results, even if their methodologies are quite commendable.