jeronimo196 comments on Reductive Reference

[jeronimo196]

How do you know that water always boils at the same temperature?

I remember reading it somewhere...

I see your point. But if water didn’t always boil at the same temperature, why would we bother inventing thermometers?

The moral of the story is not so much that science always works, it’s that it works in a way that’s more coherentist than foundationalist.

Right. And since science does work, coherentism gets a big boost in probability, right until the sun stop rising every day.

And the downside of coherentism is that you can have more than one equally coherent wordlviews...

But would they work equally well? We value science primarily for giving us results, not for being coherent.

If both views are equally coherent and give us equal result (or the results are unclear as of yet), choosing one would be privileging the hipotesis.

[TAG]

I see your point. But if water didn’t always boil at the same temperature, why would we bother inventing thermometers?

We have more need to measure the unpredictable than the predictable.

If both views are equally coherent and give us equal result (or the results are unclear as of yet), choosing one would be privileging the hipotesis.

Not every one sees things that way. The more hardline claims require the physical map to exclude others.

[jeronimo196]

I see your point. But if water didn’t always boil at the same temperature, why would we bother inventing thermometers?

We have more need to measure the unpredictable than the predictable.

If there was nothing with constant temperature, thermometers would work very differently. My first instinct was to say they wouldn’t work at all. But then I remembered the entire field of economics, so your point stands.

Not every one sees things that way. The more hardline claims require the physical map to exclude others.

Good luck with that. I couldn’t calculate the behaviour of the quarks in a single hydrogen atom if my life depended on it.