No, I'm not taking these things for granted. I am simply making the empirical observation that the scientific method has produced vastly more tangible progress than other methods, and it has produced this progress in areas that were previously believed to be inaccessible to science. Science works in ways that no other method does.
> mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be. You may not like the idea that clocks in space run faster than clocks on earth, but that is also manifestly how the world behaves.
> It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics
you're both wrong. What the many-worlds interpretation is, is philosophy. It's thinking about what could be that would be explanatory, in the absence of being able to test it; just as atomic theory was philosophy before it was experimentally shown... and it's still philosophy to think about what has actually been shown, since it was not long after it was "shown" that indivisible atoms became divisible into fundamental particles, that they in turn turned out not to be fundamental either.
Aren't the various interpretations of QM all empirically indistinguishable from within the universe, which is why they are interpretations and not, say, hypotheses?
> It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
It's an interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. It's not the only possible interpretation.
> You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be.
Yeah? I agree that quantum appears to be the way the world works; show me your concrete evidence for many worlds. You can't do it.
Most people would agree that the sun emits light in all directions, but there is no way to prove it with concrete evidence. The only thing you can prove with concrete evidence is that the sun emits light in the direction of objects in our solar system that we can see. We infer that the sun emits light in all directions because that is the best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.
Many-worlds is the same. We can't demonstrate their existence, we infer it from the current-best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.
Many-worlds is by far not accepted to be the "current-best explanation".
It's a candidate. It's not clear it's right.
I realize that's argument by authority, and that's considered a fallacy...
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Physics-Princeton-Foundati...
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Al...
Or, if you don't feel like buying a book:
https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
Or, if you prefer a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
BTW, it may come as a surprise to learn that I am actually not a big proponent of many-worlds despite recognizing that it is in fact a logical consequence of the math. If so, you may find this interesting too:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/04/on-shadow-photons-and-re...
and a follow-up written ten years later:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...
The chasm between my grades in linear algebra and my grades in quantum begs to differ... :(
That's true. But just because this is not a valid justification of the assertion that science does not approach an account of reality on its own terms, it does not follow that science does not in fact approach an account of reality on its own terms.
> To suggest otherwise is to postulate additional metaphysical baggage that even I, the lowly philosopher, find intolerable.
Really? Why? What aspect of reality do you believe is inherently beyond the scope of scientific inquiry?
A reference to the published literature is a cop-out??? Sorry, no.
> Sure, the methodical process of science doesn't, strictly-speaking, require induction, but we still have to decide whether to expect the result of scientific inquiry to be useful.
What??? No! We just have to observe empirically that the results of scientific inquiry are useful.
> Popper’s account appears to be incomplete in an important way. There are always many hypotheses which have not yet been refuted by the evidence, and these may contradict one another. According to the strictly deductive framework, since none are yet falsified, they are all on an equal footing. Yet, scientists will typically want to say that one is better supported by the evidence than the others. We seem to need more than just deductive reasoning to support practical decision-making (Salmon 1981). Popper did indeed appeal to a notion of one hypothesis being better or worse “corroborated” by the evidence. But arguably, this took him away from a strictly deductive view of science. It appears doubtful then that pure deductivism can give an adequate account of scientific method.
where "this issue" is:
> The new riddle of induction, perhaps?
The reference I gave you was not directly to Popper, but rather to chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality", which you quite obviously did not read because it directly answers the problem described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
If you want to relegate philosophy to obfuscation and trivialities, a good starting place would be to demonstrate that you've made it past the undergraduate, foot stomping "science" phase that, honestly, not enough "actual" scientists seem to have made it past, bringing us mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.