Friday, October 13, 2017

Human, all too human …

… The Myth of Scientific Objectivity by William A. Wilson | Articles | First Things.

[Einstein] began his career as a dedicated positivist and empiricist, only losing the faith when it failed him again and again. Rigorous attempts to inductively postulate laws from data brought him only years of stagnation and failure while he searched for the field equations of general relativity, and nearly cost him priority for the discovery. In desperation, Einstein searched for the mathematically simplest explanation, embracing prior philosophical criteria as a constraint on the space of possible theories, and then found his answer almost immediately. He ultimately concluded that, as he put it in his Autobiographical Notes, “no collection of empirical facts however comprehensive can ever lead to the formulation of such complicated equations. A theory can be tested by experience, but there is no way from experience to the construction of a theory.” In other words, the inductive approach to theory-building on which so many of science’s claims to neutrality hang is not only a poor description of science as it exists, but is, because of the limited powers of the human mind, not a way that science even could be done. The consequence of this, as Einstein said in an interview at the end of his life, is that “every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a ‘positivist’ he may fancy himself.”
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