Misunderstanding Empiricism

We're arguing at cross-purposes here. No inductive knowledge is certain, whether it's acquired by scientific investigation or our everyday experience. That's all my statement meant.Knowledge acquired by scientific investigation is of the same type as knowledge acquired through our everyday experience. The extra rigour of the scientific method can give us more confidence in the results, but it's a mistake to think that the scientific method gives us access to a special kind of knowledge. I know that's not a mistake you would make, but my OP wasn't aimed at you .I thought it was clear from my opening post that that's what I was saying, but obviously I didn't explain myself clearly enough.As to the question of considering my personal experience as flawed when I make a decision; of course, that's always a consideration. But when we have to make a decision we have to go with what we have, flawed or not. (If you don't know something, how can you take that into account?).I'm stressing personal experience in this thread only because I'm talking about empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. I'm not claiming personal experience as a special fount of knowledge, separate from the limitations of empiricism. Just the opposite in fact.Does that clear things up.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

As Brad says, it depends how you see the class relations of science and empiricism. Does science share all the properties of empiricism? Or are there properties of empiricism that science doesn't share? Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

My opinion is quite different, Percy. I think any intelligent person can have a good crack at understanding the fundamentals of a scientific field with a few weeks research. It's a skill most of us acquire as we mature, the skill to separate the irrelevant dross from the important features of a subject.The complexity of a scientific field lies in the detail, detail that you need to master if you want to make a career in science, but not if all you want to do is make a judgement based on the current scientific consensus.(Oh, and by the way, I say this as an ex-scientist, not as a meddling layperson. Although I am that too ).

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

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Maybe I've just spent too much time in my life finding ways around brick walls to just cave because something doesn't go as planned. A study or experiment is very specific. Closing one avenue doesn't negate all the other avenues to be investigated. Did a study or experiment address my particular issue? Does it negate one avenue and leave others open?

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I have no argument at all with this approach. In fact, I think it is a great open-minded way of thinking about the evidence.But then you go and spoil it all by writing the following:

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You don't wish to take into consideration McGarey's work, I do.

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I absolutely did consider what we could of McGarey's work, and so did everybody else in that thread. I just skimmed it and it seems to me that all that we ever got to see of McGarey's work was his testimonial, and his claim that castor oil is effective because it has a "vibration" that somehow heals things in the body.McGarey found that T-cells were elevated in people using castor oil packs, but our resident chemists thought that it might be caused by the residual ricin (the poison), or even just the heating pad.

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You provided nothing that showed that castor oil packs are dangerous.

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Well, other than the possible low-level ricin poisoning.What I asked for in the OP of that thread, and you never actually provided, was to be shown that castor oil packs worked.

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What you miss is that if the packs don't work for me, I won't use them,

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How do you know if they are working?

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Just because my thinking doesn't follow the same path as yours, doesn't mean it's wrong.

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Actually, the way that you think is making it far more likely that you will be wrong. This is because you give far too much credit to unscientific and pseudoscientific healthcare workers, practices, treatments, and products.

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We've had different experiences in life which equip us with different information.

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I would put it differently.I would say that we've probably had different educations which have equipped us with different ways of thinking about nature, evidence, and human psychology.I mean, I am positive that Percy and I have had very different experiences in life, yet we've both been telling you the same thing WRT science, anecdote, and healthcare. There's a reason for that.

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What I asked for in the OP of that thread, and you never actually provided, was to be shown that castor oil packs worked.

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Obviously I don't understand what is necessary to "show" you that something works over a written forum. In an effort to learn, you have the floor. Show me how it is done.Show me that Midol Menstrual Complete works.

Great idea for a thread, Java.It goes without saying that science has its limits. What some scientists lose sight of, though professional habit, is that many decisions they make depend on thought processes that are not--or at least not entirely--scientific.And that's okay. It's just better, since all of us do this, to be aware. It puts things on a reality basis.Science can show us ways to beat smallpox. But it can't tell us to try. The decision to fight, the crucial one in the process, is made on different grounds.Scientists, focused as they are on the methods and weapons, often leave the other parts of the picture unexamined. Those other factors, thus ignored, become invisible to some individuals. They credit science for more than it has really achieved.So you sometimes hear scientists saying things like 'We can thank science for beating smallpox.' Well, no. Not really.Science didn't beat smallpox. Human beings did, doing the things human beings do and thinking the way human beings think. Science provided a method and weapon.A white coat does not wear itself. It is worn by a human being who remains one the whole time he or she works in the lab, and who remains one long after hanging up the coat and turning out the lights.That's why exploring the things human beings do, and think, and know has value. This remains the case even if our investigation leaves the lab and takes us farther afield.The decision to fight smallpox was not science. It was human.And that decision was important, and consequential.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Thank you.As you might guess, I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your post .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I don't know. Why are you asking me? Don't you already know why you hold your position? You said that empiricism provides a methodology for science, and I pointed out that it is science, not empiricism, that provides a methodology, that science only employs empiricism, that science is not contained within empiricism. If you have a different view on this then you'll have to tell rather than ask me what it is.--Percy

Then how do you explain creationists and anti-vaccinationists and UFO-ologists and all the rest of the woo-woo crowd? Such people would appear to represent evidence that we do not all have equal potential for learning a scientific approach to the assessment of evidence. Would that it were so. As PurpleDawn has related, for her the problem is that she sees a difference of opinion between equally legitimate experts, while a cursory investigation reveals that the difference is really between mainstream science and quacks.As PurpleDawn and LindaLou have said many times, experts and/or the scientific consensus can be wrong. No one would ever argue with that, because it is most certainly true. But they use this fact to draw two false conclusions. First, they conclude that because experts can be wrong that therefore they likely are wrong concerning whatever the pet issue is. And second, they conclude that the opinion of people who can be wrong is no better than anyone else's opinion.--Percy

When explaining to fundamentalists why science is different from religion, it's fine to talk about an ideal scientific method, but it's disingenuous to do the same when arguing with someone (such as Purpledawn here and in other threads) who is expressing concerns about the practicalities of how science works in the real world.Real scientists don't do science according to an ideal scientific method, and the scientific community doesn't arrive at a consensus in a vacuum. The following factors all influence the way science is actually practised:1. Human NatureEgotism can skew scientific research in all kinds of ways. Two in particular spring to mind:A love of mystification
We all like to feel that we're masters of a subject that others would have difficulty understanding. And the communication problems that arise often mean that results are misunderstood or misinterpreted.Career advancement
What gets you to the top in science is having a big theory and getting results. Nobody's impressed by someone who just goes around falsifying theories. That's just the way it is. And if you combine a big ego with a wrong theory, you can find that research in a field can get skewed for years.2. PoliticsOne has to be wary of scientific pronouncements where the science is bound up with public policy. That's why people are sceptical about the denials of an MMR/autism link: because they know that, even if there were a link, the scientific consensus would be skewed by the public policy and any evidence would have to clear a higher hurdle than might otherwise be the case.3. MoneyIf there's money involved, then again the science can be skewed. Because scientific discovery is a long-term thing, it's possible to exploit short-term uncertainty to skew the consensus for financial gain. People understand this, and that's why they're right to be sceptical about the claims of pharmaceutical science. (Although, as Percy and Nator have pointed out, the same scepticism also needs to be applied to snake-oil salesmen.)

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

OK. I'll get to the point .Science is a form of empirical enquiry, so science shares all the properties of empiricism, including the view that our knowledge of the world is provisional. But science adds a methodology that isn't shared with other forms of empirical enquiry. So I half agree with you and half don't.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I'm not sure I see the relationship of what you say to empiricism, but you're endorsing the same mistakes that already drive the opinions of people like PurpleDawn and LindaLou. Any qualities of the human condition, including the ones you mention like ego, money and politics, can influence science, but they influence everything else, too. Everything people do contains these flaws, not just science. You mention this at the end of your post, but only in parentheses when it should actually be in bold capitals, because it completely invalidates the basis of your criticism.What distinguishes science from all other ways of knowing is its consensus-driven self-correcting nature. It was science that discovered that the theory of humours and bleeding and vitalistic theories like chiropractic were invalid, and distrusting science merely because it is a human endeavor would be to ignore its record of success in reducing and even sometimes eliminating disease while extending lifetimes. Whatever might be the impact of the human condition on science, the record of success indicates that it must be very, very small. The scientific approach is designed to reduce the impact of human foibles, and the evidence of history is that it does a very good job of this.Science is not perfect, and no one claims it is, and certainly when science combines with the profit motive you're going to have problems like thalidomide and Vioxx, but this is just evidence that science isn't perfect, which, of course, we already knew. The big mistake that too many people like PurpleDawn and LindaLou make is concluding from this that science can't be trusted and is really no better, or is even inferior to, anecdotal approaches. And, returning to the thread's topic, the problem stems from a lack of comprehension of just how essential is a scientific approach (which includes empiricism) to obtaining an accurate understanding of the real world.--Percy

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Obviously I don't understand what is necessary to "show" you that something works over a written forum. In an effort to learn, you have the floor. Show me how it is done.

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Show me that Midol Menstrual Complete works.

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OK.The three active ingredients in Midol Menstrual Complete are acetaminophen (pain reliever), caffeine (stimulant), and pyrilamine maleate (diuretic). Here's my pub med search results for acetaminophen. In reading over the abstracts, it looks as though the randomized double-blind testing has shown it to be more effective than placebo for the relief of pain from primary dysmenorrhoea, but not as effective as other OTC pain relievers like ibuprofen. Here is the NIH information page for acetaminophen. Here's my pub med search results for caffeine as it relates to primary dysmenorrhoea. It seems that there is a body of literature demonstrating that caffeine acts as "analgesic adjuvant" and "enhances the efficacy of paracetamol" (the European version of acetaminophen). Caffeine is also a diuretic.However, caffeine is also indicated in making severe PMS symptoms worse, so should probably be avoided by those women who have severe PMS. Here's the drug information page for pyrilamine maleate as included in Midol. I ran into some difficulty finding studies related to use of this product as a diuretic for menstrual bloating. The issue here may be that Midol has been on the market for a very long time, before today's stricter standards for efficacy.OK, so now we have some information with which to work to determine if the ingredients in Midol are effective for thir intended use. My conclusion is, based upon my 20 minutes of online searching is:Acetaminophen--Yes, it is more effective than placebo, but not as effective as other NSAIDS like ibuprofen.Caffeine--If a woman has severe PMS, she might want to avoid caffeine as studies seem to indicate that caffeine makes symptoms worse, but as it seems to enhance the effectiveness of acetaminophen, it can be considered to work better than placebo.Pyrilamine maleate--unknown effectiveness given the lack of information at this time.Here's the drug information page for pyrilamine maleate as included in Midol. I ran into some difficulty finding studies related to use of this product as a diuretic for menstrual bloating. The issue here may be that Midol has been on the market for a very long time, before today's stricter standards for efficacy.OK, so now we have some information with which to work to determine if the ingredients in Midol are effective for thir intended use. My conclusion is, based upon my 20 minutes of online searching is:Acetaminophen--Yes, it is more effective than placebo, but not as effective as other NSAIDS like ibuprofen.Caffeine--If a woman has severe PMS, she might want to avoid caffeine as studies seem to indicate that caffeine makes symptoms worse, but as it seems to enhance the effectiveness of acetaminophen, it can be considered to work better than placebo.Pyrilamine maleate--unknown effectiveness given the lack of information at this time.Edited by nator, : No reason given.

Well, I'm glad you only half agree with me since you're half wrong. The provisional quality is a property of science, not of empiricism.--Percy

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Scientists, focused as they are on the methods and weapons, often leave the other parts of the picture unexamined.

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I think you need to support that assertion.