>But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.

If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai, for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly.

>What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.

Yes, we do see their effects. Science deals with latent properties and objects all the time. After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred.

Nothing abnormal here.

(Never mind the philosophers who claim to know their perception is veridical because it's more intuitive that way rather than because they examined how it was working.)

>I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:

I am once again reminded of how philosophers completely fail to understand science and scientists, and thus caricature us as blind idiots every chance they get.

"After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred."

This is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one, and a dubious one at that (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/).

You don't seem to understand. I wasn't making a philosophy-of-mind claim about philosophical sense-data. I was making a claim, a very basic claim, in neuroscience. In some theories, the nerves don't even pass unaltered signals up to the brain! Everything beyond the sensory nerve-ending itself may involve some amount of inference, inferences performed in the spinal cord and sensorimotor cortex themselves long before a percept enters conscious awareness.

You may not think you're talking about sense data, but you might as well be.

Science doesn't operate from the first person perspective. The data of science is not neural firings, it is public observations and measurements.

The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.

[0] I say directly because there are contexts where we have to account for bias, optical illusions, and whatnot. It's the same sense in which astronomy is not directly about telescopes, though astronomers spend a lot of time worrying about telescopes.

> You may not think you're talking about sense data, but you might as well be.

Ah, isn't the imperialism of philosophers so likeable? Hey scientists, you're not talking about the stuff in your experiments, you're talking about this other thing we made up! Because we say so!

>The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.

Actually, according to our most up-to-date paradigm, they're both instances of hierarchical Bayes inference, one of which is implemented in hardware, and the other of which is using said hardware as a primitive base to build higher-precision inferences.

For someone trying to stick up for philosophy, you should read more of it, since I'm getting many of the details from Andy Clark's recent book.

Is this use of a rather silly caricature an example of philosophical thinking?

On reflection, that was a cheap shot, and I would retract it if I could.