Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
I guess what ever floats your boat. Personally I go with the latter option. Science is fascinating and surprisingly useful from time to time. I always like to keep some around the house.
EDIT: Btw I meant to go more the way of "problem of induction", although it's pretty much the same thing when described like this (=badly). Descartés somehow never really made that much of an impression on me, but I really liked Hume at certain point. Funny guy. That was also about the point where I realized that I don't really want to be a philosopher after all. It's been about fourteen years since I last read that stuff.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction, for those who care) |
I heard the jury's still out on science.
But yeah, what you described does fit Hume's ideas of skepticism; nothing wrong with the way you described it, I just didn't make the connection. As I understand Hume, the only way we can justify the inductive process is by inducing that it's been effective in the past.
A thing about the LHC though: the scientific process should not generally lead to such a wide range of differing theories. If everyone is working from the same observable phenomena, and following the same scientific principles, they should arrive at the same conclusion (in the same way that a variety of early scientists, working independently but using the same evidence, all deduced that the earth was round). You've got a whole generation of physicists who are coming up with these theories that are based on further theories, and have little relation to observed results. And the LHC will hopefully give enough evidence to disprove a few of these theories (or at least cause their authors to spend some late night rewriting things), and allow the rest of the theories to exist until the next, bigger collider is built.