There is no scientific method or epistemology

in science there is no regard for ontological differences. Therefore things don't add up.

How is the scientific method supposed to have any regard for ontological differences when those differences are not agreed upon? It would be, in my humble opinion as a non-scientist, terribly unscientific for the scientific method to try and account for ontological differences.

Didymos, between the two of us I think you are the one rambling.

Seeing as no start point can be found or examined in space and time (and therefore by human percieving and reasoning..and thus science) no processes can be examined properly. Science can only "guess" (in a scientific way) about what is going on.

Contrary to what you may think of me I do not think science is useless or anything. It has its place and its values. I do, however, think people in general and scientist more so should realise its place and appreciate its delicate existence. All things humanity "knows" are based on assumptions (axioms) which cannot be proved.

I think that science should not so much "have a regard" for "ontological differences which have not been proved", but that science (scientists) should not deny the fact that they cannot explain certain things. This kind of deni-all is what the church has professed allthrough the dark ages and is what has kept Europe back for more then a thousand years. Please do not repeat the mistake.

The rest of your post I will not reply to. I find the remarks a little "off"; especially for a moderator. I am not going to report the post because I think the values you have added to yourself (a.k.a. ego) have suffered enough due to my reasoning.

Somethings that relate directly to science and where science would fall short are...

I will have you knwo that my university has been around for centuries and has been a very fine one for all that time. I don;t think any university in America has been around for that long, has it?

These are NOT related to science. They are related to human psychological quests for meaning.

The reason for the big bang (for example) is irrelevant to science, and something for which science should be indifferent. A reason (if there is such a thing) for the big bang or anything else does nothing to help us understand what it was, how it happened, etc.

In fact finding reason in natural things is completely antithetical to science, because it is teleological. And there is probably no worse source of bias and contamination in science than teleology.

So fine, science isn't capable of looking at nonscientific things like metaphysical yearnings for meaning. But these things are irrelevant to science and frankly relevant only to the subset of humans that can't find meaning in their own lives unless it happens to flow out of the universe as a whole.

In fact, it's a statement of the obvious that science can't investigate these things, just as it would be a statement of the obvious that Christian theology doesn't opine about photosynthesis or the geology of glaciers. Similarly, it's a statement of the obvious that metaphysics will never help us discover a new species, sequence a gene, find an HIV vaccine, or lead us to understand better what happened at the beginning of the universe.

Does that matter? Stanford University opened in 1891, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened in 1861, and Cornell opened in 1865, and yet I'd rather get my science education at one of them than at the University of Al-Karaouine which opened in 859 AD.

Science is all about cause and effect.

I am going to ignore this.

Anyway, I do not take kindly to people talking down to my school before they even know which it is. It makes no sense.

That's not true. Cause and effect in science are simply temporal associations -- but the formal concepts of "cause" and "effect" can only be spoken of colloquially in science. Furthermore, there are many types of investigation in science that are NOT related to causality and a produced effect. For instance, the human genome project (and other genetic mapping projects) are undertaken to make our knowledge base more comprehensive and to generate further research, but they are not answering a question about causality or mechanism. Doing a gene knockout to find out whether a gene is essential or to learn what functions an organism lacks absent that gene is also not about cause and effect -- it may produce an effect, but the question being asked is mechanistic.

Why? I made some valid points, and I'm interested in your response.

Understandable. But to be fair, you can get a bad education at a good school, or you can get no education at a good school. Harvard may have one of the most respected philosophy departments in the country, but in my 3 years at Harvard I never spent a moment in contact with that department -- so I'm not going to invoke my affiliation with that institution to defend my understanding of philosophy. Similarly you can be at a great school and not get a science education -- and one NEEDS a good background in science to critique it -- otherwise you're only critiquing a preconception.

I don't imply one way or another that your science education has been good or bad. But you talk about science using generalities that from within science seem ignorant of what science actually is and does.

My bet is you don't want to open up to this because of some sort of definition you are humoring.

Science is about studying processes.

Because they have no bearing whatsoever on my words.

If you do not realise that science is metaphysical in nature and that all science does is reason about things witnessed, you need to re-evaluate your position. It exists purely as metaphysical, it therefore necessarily has a causal existance; ergo cause and effect.

I have a career in this field, so why would you assume that I'm stubbornly holding onto a definition? Isn't it natural that with your and my different experiences of science that I'm going to see it differently than you do? It so happens that I think you have a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about science and perhaps (puzzingly) some antipathy. But I'm operating from the standpoint that perhaps your thoughts on the matter and my experience in the field could lead to some kind of productive discussion. Instead you leave another frustrated ultimatum about how this is your last exasperated attempt to get through my obstinacy.

Except for the billion things science studies that are NOT processes. Studying anatomy is not the study of a process. Neither is cataloguing genetic diversity. Neither is studying haplotype maps, gene sequencing, taxonomy, or phylogenetics.

They were points that I independently made. For lack of a response I'll regard you as conceding all of these points.

Yes, science "reasons about things witnessed", or systematically investigates the observable. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is a human mental construct -- there is no sense data, no external verification, and therefore no reason whatsoever to presume that there is such a thing as a metaphysical truth. It's just a language game.

To say that science is metaphysical in nature is truly absurd. Cause and effect are not real things. They're human impositions on observations (just like the rest of metaphysics). As you point out there is infinite regress of causes from a metaphysical point of view. But since science can pick whatever resolution it wants, there need not be any conception of prior cause if it's irrelevant to the question at hand. If insulin causes glucose to go into muscle cells, it really doesn't matter if ultimately this is because of a primal cause at the beginning of the universe -- you can understand insulin physiology or treat diabetes anyway.

Metaphysical questions are really not interesting from a scientific standpoint, they don't inform science, they don't advance science, and they belong in churches and philosophy classrooms, not in labs. Science exists independently of any metaphysical question, and this has been true historically -- metaphysics arose by abstracting concepts from observable things, NOT the other way around. And unlike metaphysics, scientific questions can actually be answered. If some in this thread argue that there is no scientific method, then there REALLY is no metaphysical method.

That the starting point and the ending point are, for all intents and purposes, the same does not make them no process. A "thing" is being studied and for this study several things are needed. A scematic of the "thing" is offcourse needed. The study of the "thing" is the study of a process. The noting of the findings is bookkeeping of sorts. Regardless science is a process which studies processes; no matter how short the process is.

Metaphysics is reason. What is there to reason about do you think?

Seeing as the process of "all" can never be fully understood by science any intermittent process cannot be fully understood either.

I would like to know what your personal theory is by the way, seeing as you do not think cause and effect exist in reality

observations are formed by the way we understand our observations

Suffice to say that scientific questions are metaphysical by default seeing as questioning is metaphysical.

If science would lead to the phenomenon instead of the noumenon one might best abolish it for utter non-sense.

Well, I think you're making more of a semantic argument than a substantive one. Perhaps I am as well. We are probably (almost certainly, in fact) thinking of the same thing, but we disagree about the application of terms like cause, effect, process, thing, etc.

The thing with metaphysical discourse is it hinges on terminology in a way that science doesn't. Which is why we could interchangeably use certain synonyms (or near-synonyms, like 'germ' and 'bug' and 'microbe', for instance) in science, so long as the concept being referenced is clear and observible. But can you do the same with metaphysical terms like 'form' and 'function' and 'noumenon' and 'cause'? Is the referenced concept so obvious? In science you can refer back to the rock or the bacterium without using language -- but in metaphysics there is no concrete observable reference, and this requires using the selfsame language to provide definitions.

Words like cause, effect, and process have been used differently even within the philosophical lexicon, and when we admix them with colloquial speech they can obviously be used imprecisely. And THIS is central to our disagreement -- that we're thinking of similar things and applying poorly defined (or even undefinable) terms to them differently than one another.

I agree that all metaphysics is reason; but I disagree that all reason is metaphysics. Following a trail of evidence, as in science, is not metaphysical, because the reasoning is punctuated by observable things. In metaphysics the reasoned concepts are punctuated by other reasoned concepts -- there is nothing concrete to give stability. This is why metaphysics has been so repeatedly slammed in modern philosophy, by the likes of Wittgenstein and Derrida and Lyotard and others, and why metaphysics doesn't stand up to Popper's falsifiability criteria. Metaphysics is rightly accused of being a word game, and if reduced to atomic logic it actually expresses nothing. Metaphysics is interesting historically, but it has not been an important part of philosophy in about 300 years.

Ok, I agree with this. But scientific understanding and epistemology is about sufficiency of evidence and confidence. No responsible scientist speaks of the absolute.

For instance we make statistical statements like P values that quantify the probability that a difference between groups is from random chance. So if I show that people from Holland are more likely than people from the Congo to have fair skin with a P value of 0.00000001, that STILL means that there is a 0.000001% chance that the difference in groups is due to random chance based on my sample.

By convention, this probability is so small that we will accept the results as true. You're correct that knowledge is never absolute in science. But I don't think that means that all scientific knowledge necessarily falls apart because of a lack of attachment to the absolute. That's a metaphysical concern, but not a scientific concern.

If you reduce all interactions and processes in nature down to subatomic elements, you run into the Heisenberg problem in which we can only speak probabilistically about the location of any particle. This means that ALL processes, even 'obvious' causal ones (like how holding ice in your hand causes it to melt), in the end still become reduced to the uncertainty of individual subatomic particles whose interactions cannot be known or observed. So cause and effect are only apparent at the level of limited resolution, i.e. selectively limiting our observation to the piece of ice and not the smaller subatomic constituents.

Let me also add that it's not about "reality", which is a term you use here. I'm talking purely about scientific methodology and epistemology. Sure, I can believe cause and effect exist in a pure reality (to which lacking omniscience I have no access), and we can (and do) infer causality in science. But science NEVER proves causality at the ultimate level -- it doesn't even seek to and this cannot be written into its methodology. The scientific method provides certain conditions and derives data -- causality may be inferred, but it is not actually studied and is not part of the scientific method.

This is cognitive, not metaphysical.

Again, to formulate a question is cognitive.

It is without a doubt that empirical observations (scientific or not) are what created metaphysics as a type of discourse. The Pythagorean theorem, which one might call a universal, was only possible to derive by first studying particular right-triangles (or at least being aware of them). Plato's ideals were extrapolated or inferred from his observation of particulars -- he never saw the good -- he saw (and conceived of) instances of good that he abstracted to an ideal. Aristotle's metaphysical concepts of form and function were derived from his VERY scientific observations of natural things. More complex, abstract metaphysical concepts still are only abstractions derived from knowledge of particulars. And axioms (and laws) in science are SECONDARY to the observations, not primary. You could never derive a "law of gravity" if you were never able to observe it first.

Furthermore, humans develop senses LONG before they develop the ability to reason. Unborn babies can hear, see, taste, feel, and smell, and they have been shown to recognize their mother's voice immediately after birth just based on hearing her voice antenatally. Sense perception is obviously present in babies and young children, who have at first very little linguistic capability, and don't develop even concrete reasoning until 3 or 4 years of age.

So by the time the very ability to understand a metaphysical idea is present, one has gone through years of sense perception, memory formation, social and linguistic development, and concrete reasoning -- ALL of which come from sensory experiences. There is no possibility of metaphysics without experience, and there is no possibility of metaphysical truths and assumptions without first having empirically derived truths and assumptions.

So in the end I think it's fairly self-evident that it's human cognition, and the human way of organizing and categorizing things, that allows us to use reason to abstract out metaphysical concepts and have metaphysical discourse.

I've always felt that the noumenon exists only conceptually -- and thus it is a phenomenon unto itself.

Just to note...most of Kant's theories and philosophies were debunked...

Just to note...most of Kant's theories and philosophies were debunked...make sure the ones you refer to aren't on that list.

There is no such thing as an a priori intuition in the absence of experience, language, social connection, and sense data. Why? Because flawed or not, you have all these experiences long before you ever learn intuition. So intuition and reasoning never exist in the absence of these experiences.

And I've studied and read all the philosophers you've mentioned extensively. But thanks for the suggestions. In the meantime you might take note that Kant's metaphysics, while revolutionary in their time, are a good 250 years old and have very little relevance in modern thought. He's a historical figure, and his writings are central to the history of philosophy, but they look almost silly from the perspective of modern thought. I appreciate your admiration for him, but don't get yourself too locked in his arguments -- in the age of postmodernism there isn't much room anymore for another 18th century philosopher.

While I could occupy a good hour responding to your post, my opinion is sufficiently known in this thread as is yours. And while I do not accept any of your refutations, I'd rather just move on than belabor the same points. We're going to posture to the point where we'll do no more than walk in rhetorical circles around one another. Let's leave it at this where our opinions are on the table and perhaps we can return to the original theme of the thread.

Oh, by the way, if you really think I'm referring to Aristotle in any way here, you need to put down the magic mushrooms. I don't identify with very much of his philosophy, though I do admire how diverse and advanced it was for its era. The harm done by Aristotle to modern thought has nothing to do with him, though -- it's not his fault the church dogmatized him.

At any rate, it doesn't take a very careful reading of Aristotle to realize that my thoughts have nothing to do with his.

In this thread I've rejected metaphysics altogether as nothing but empty wordplay, I've denied that cause and effect are epistemologically discrete or identifiable things, I've declared that observations of the universe boil down to uncertainty, and I've declared that ultimate metaphysical questions are essentially useless except to people who cannot find meaning in their own lives without a transcendental crutch. Aristotle would chafe at all these points.

I have a lot more use for Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Kuhn, Derrida, and Nietzsche than I do Aristotle.

Let's just remember that you are an epirist and I am a rationalist

if you want to call it quits after my great argumentations...

you think phenomena are what exists and I think noumena are what exists