But because empiricism cannot be conclusive, neither can science.
Not quite; this is a case where reducing certainty from a numeric scale to a yes/no dichotomy loses something very important. As evidence accumulates, it can bring you arbitrarily close to a probability of 0 or 1, just not to 0 or 1 exactly. A more accurate way of phrasing this is: Empiricism can use only a finite amount of evidence, so while science can be arbitrarily certain, it cannot be infinitely certain.
Not defending the poster: just trying to salvage the thread.
As evidence accumulates, it can bring you arbitrarily close to a probability of 0 or 1, just not to 0 or 1 exactly.
Is this right? The probability space reserved for the milieu of extreme skeptical hypotheses seems more like a constant (albeit a very small one) than a range which can be arbitrarily small.
Not quite; this is a case where reducing certainty from a numeric scale to a yes/no dichotomy loses something very important. As evidence accumulates, it can bring you arbitrarily close to a probability of 0 or 1, just not to 0 or 1 exactly. A more accurate way of phrasing this is: Empiricism can use only a finite amount of evidence, so while science can be arbitrarily certain, it cannot be infinitely certain.
Not defending the poster: just trying to salvage the thread.
Is this right? The probability space reserved for the milieu of extreme skeptical hypotheses seems more like a constant (albeit a very small one) than a range which can be arbitrarily small.