Does science rely on a set of unfounded presuppositions and therefore its validity is questionable?

[u/GPlayover]

Long text incoming

I asked this same question to r/askphilosophy but I figured I’d as folks very familiar with philosophy of science. For context I’m a scientist by trade and I want to get a stronger grip on the philosophy side of knowledge and stuff.

For context, this is all based off a counter to a scientific education video in a comment thread
To summarize, the argument is science and thus scientific disciplines only work within a naturalistic worldview and theories, evidence, and interpretations are based on the unfounded presupposition of naturalism and because of that, fail to justify their source of knowledge.

This is a direct quote from the commenter to avoid any paraphrasing errors.
“you have a assumption technically called a presupposition. It's a framework a rule set you view the world through. Yours is naturalism. You see a fossil data as you interpret it through your framework naturalism. The fossil doesn't say anything it doesn't come with a name tag and bio telling you anything about itself. You use theory based on your framework naturalism to make a theory laden outcome evolution. Evolution makes sense in the framework of naturalism. That shows coherence inside the framework of naturalism. It doesn't prove the framework is correct. If you use the outcomes to prove the framework it's circular reasoning begging the question. It you change the assumption the presupposition you change the entire framework and rule set. The very same data the fossil now has an entire different theory because data the fossil is underdetermined. It's not determined because a fossil doesn't say what it is. I'm asking how do you justify your framework your assumption your presupposition naturalism is the correct framework vs other frameworks. Get it. Philosophy of science the underdetermination of data thesis. My question isn't about evolution or science it's a knowledge question. How do you justify the knowledge based rule set framework of naturalism. It's your presupposition.
You have to justify it. Because the data can be interpreted differently using different frameworks.”

When presented scientific evidence by others, the commenter almost always defaults to “you presenting physical evidence collected under a presupposed method to collection and interpretation does not justify tube scientific method as it has unfounded presuppositions and this the interpretations are also unfounded.” Quote: “A presupposition like naturalism is the untestable rule book that dictates what counts as testing, evidence and data in the first place. You can test a hypothesis with data you cannot use data to test the naturalistic rulebook you used to gather that data. Justify your rulebook naturalism without circular reasoning.”

When finally giving their counter this is what they say. Quote:
“Then when asked directing on their worldview they have this to say “TAG is the only way out of the criterion problem and the trilemma. Specifically the Orthodox Christian version. You have to go
transcendental. And see which worldview can account for justify and ground the necessary preconditions for knowledge… TAG is the impossibility of the contrary. You aren't using autonomous human reason as a flashlight to "go out and locate" God. You are pointing out that reason itself requires an ontological anchor to exist at all. This is a meta level higher order argument. You're conflating empirical observation with the worldview of Naturalism. Christians use empirical observation because our framework accounts for the uniformity of nature, human sensory reliability, and the laws of logic all anchored in the Logos. Naturalists use empirical observation on blind, unjustified faith. In an unguided, material universe, there is zero epistemic reason to assume the universe will behave uniformly tomorrow Hume's Problem of Induction. Christians and naturalists both use test tubes. The difference is the Christian has an epistemic right to trust the test tube, while the naturalist is borrowing Christian assumptions about order and logic while denying the foundation that makes them possible. On Evolution. TAG establishes Level 2 the ground of logic and knowledge. It doesn't instantly dictate every Level 1 detail about physics or biology. How God created is a question of revelation and grounded observation, not something ‘sneaked' into TAG. We don't trap God inside an autonomous human logic syllogism. Human logic isn't the ultimate judge standing above reality it is a derivative tool that reflects the Logos. How do we know the foundation? Through Revelation. Finite humans don't need exhaustive knowledge to have certainty; we receive revelation from the infinite source who grounds logic, order, and mind in the first place. Without Revelation, autonomous human reason is stuck in Agrippa's Trilemma. With Revelation, knowledge has its necessary anchors.”

My main question now is does their worldview actually stand against the same criticisms they lobby against science and if the criticisms are valid under epistemological concepts and finally, are the criticisms are even sound? Thanks!

[u/AutoModerator]

Please check that your post is actually on topic. This subreddit is not for sharing vaguely science-related or philosophy-adjacent shower-thoughts. The philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. Please note that upvoting this comment does not constitute a report, and will not notify the moderators of an off-topic post. You must actually use the report button to do that.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/knockingatthegate → u/[deleted]]

Isn’t OP asking for help addressing those who are doing the religious preaching?

[u/233C]

Yes, epistemology has been aware of the Agrippa's trilemma since forever: arguments can only 1-relate backward ad infinitum, 2-be circular, or 3-rely on arbitrary postulates.
Yes, science relies on arbitrary postulates that are simply assumed to be true (things like "something exists").
Feel free to dismiss every scientific statement based on that, but it's nothing new.

[u/fox-mcleod → u/233C]

No it doesn't. Science relies on theories not axioms. The difference being theories are always held only tentatively and always up for correction.

Nobody has to assume something exists. You can check. And if you're ever able to falsify it, science demands you overturn your assumption.

Science is not a mathematical or formal logic field like math. The name for that error is called indictivism. Instead, science relies on abduction.

[u/parsonsrazersupport → u/fox-mcleod]

Nobody has to assume something exists. You can check. And if you're ever able to falsify it, science demands you overturn your assumption.

I don't think they mean you assume a specific thing exists, I think they mean assume things exist at all. You need to assume there is an outside world -- that Descartes' 'evil genius' is not to be blamed for our experiences -- in order to 'check' anything.

[u/fox-mcleod → u/parsonsrazersupport]

I don't think they mean you assume a specific thing exists, I think they mean assume things exist at all.

Yup. That's what I'm talking about.

To the extent "exists" is well defined, that's testable.

You need to assume there is an outside world -

I do not.

I need to theorize there is an outside world. Theories are different from assumptions. All kinds of things which have never happened could have falsified that theory. That's the only way all theories work.

[u/parsonsrazersupport → u/fox-mcleod]

Can you describe what you think of as a test to discern if there is a world outside of your personal experience of one?

EDIT for your edit: Can you say what sorts of thing would falsify the theory 'there is a world outside of my experience'?

[u/fox-mcleod → u/parsonsrazersupport]

Can you describe what you think of as a test to discern if there is a world outside of your personal experience of one?

EDIT for your edit: Can you say what sorts of thing would falsify the theory 'there is a world outside of my experience'?

Sure. Falsifying the concept of an outside world is very simple. If at any moment the simulation broke down, or there was any evidence of inherent lack of causality, or really any explanatory value to solipsism, that could all result in falsification.

Like literally any scientific theory, the theory survives precisely because it hasn't been falsified.

[u/parsonsrazersupport → u/fox-mcleod]

Gotcha, sure that makes sense. I'm happy to go with 'provisionally accept' rather than 'assume' or something like that, in that case.

EDIT: I am still happy enough with that. But I think the difficulty comes that 'testing' seems to imply going out of your way to falsify something, whereas here that seems necessarily impossible.

[u/fox-mcleod → u/parsonsrazersupport]

Gotcha, sure that makes sense. I'm happy to go with 'provisionally accept' rather than 'assume' or something like that, in that case.

We're speaking the same language now. And there's a difference between provisionally accepting something and assuming it. Imagine if we used the word "assume" to describe how we got to all scientific theories.

We don't "assume" relativity. Or "assume" dinosaurs once roamed the earth.

EDIT: I am still happy enough with that. But I think the difficulty comes that 'testing' seems to imply going out of your way to falsify something, whereas here that seems necessarily impossible.

Why?

Living tests it constantly. Basically all science does. Finding impossible results or that causality is incoherent under any theory would falsify it. We keep pushing the boundaries of ensuring reality is real at every frontier.

[u/parsonsrazersupport → u/fox-mcleod]

We're speaking the same language now.

lol well really I do think language was the main issue. By 'assume' I really meant it in the every day sense. But it's right of you to be more specific contextually, and it's correct to focus on provisionality and falsifiability as you are. I agree that we should be wary of getting caught up in induction.

Why?

Because for most theories, if I am trying to falsify them I have some real confidence that if they are wrong, under conditions that I have some power to construct, I will actually discover that that is the case.

In the case of brain in a vat or whatever, all we are doing is hoping a glitch pops up.

Perhaps because my primary scientific training is in behavior and ecology, I am getting caught in thinking of things in particular ways. Maybe if I was a physicist or something it would be easier, always hard to say that kind of thing.

[u/smashfalcon]

It would be a pretty weird coincidence if it was built on arbitrary presuppositions yet it all worked perfectly

[u/parsonsrazersupport → u/smashfalcon]

"I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil demon not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me."

[u/parsonsrazersupport]

There is no way to explain or talk about anything at all without making assumptions. You need to, at minimum, assume: there is a world outside of our experiences; our experiences give us some sort of reasonable access to that world; things generally work via consistent rules of cause and effect (even if sometimes very complicated), etc.

It does not make sense to argue that you need to 'prove' any of those things, because the very notion of proof is itself predicated on them. If things do not work by regular cause and effect; if we have no access to an outside world via our senses, there is simply no way to argue for the truth of falsity of anything at all. You can choose to just reject these assumptions, but you can't then turn around and say that they need to be justified a-circularly via your own circular argument.

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Your account must be at least a week old, and have a combined karma score of at least 10 to post here. No exceptions.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/ababababababacus]

wether it does or not, science has worked. So at best the argument goes something like:

"the method you've put your faith in for determining truths about nature might have put a man on the moon and built laptop computers and low temperature superconductors and cured all kind of diseases, but its still ultimately self referential and built on top on unprovable axioms and circular logic. I have a different system of knowledge that is none of these things its called the transcendental argument for god and it has never delivered any tangible results BUT a subset of the philosophers and theologians who care about this stuff believe that it avoids agrippas trilema!"

My response to that is that ill just go with naturalism anyway thank you very much

[u/fox-mcleod]

This is the inductivist error.

Science does not rely on assumptions and then derive reality from axioms.

Science is a process of finding out whether your guesses are correct and abandoning them if you can show they arent. This same process is self-correcting to foundational theories because no theory is above falsification.

If you can falsify naturalism, then do so.

So far, naturalism is capable of explaining everything we understand well enough to test.

Frankly, the alternatives are inherently incoherent. Either the supernatural can be understood by a physical human brain and fully communicated to another human brain by characters on a computer screen (text) — and can therefore be accounted for within the natural world. Or it cannot be understood by a physical human brain, and therefore claims made about it are nonsensical by necessity.

[u/Moral_Conundrums]

Let's clear up a few ideas, strap in because this is going to be a long one.

“you have a assumption technically called a presupposition. It's a framework a rule set you view the world through. Yours is naturalism. You see a fossil data as you interpret it through your framework naturalism. The fossil doesn't say anything it doesn't come with a name tag and bio telling you anything about itself. You use theory based on your framework naturalism to make a theory laden outcome evolution. Evolution makes sense in the framework of naturalism...

So it's false that interpreting the fossil record relies on naturalism, here presumably defined as something like: science is the best (only) guide to truth about the world. You could for example be a scientific antirealist (science doesn't tell us true things about the world it's just practically useful for making predictions about it) and still interpret the fosil record as supporting evolution.

The commenter does however say something that's true. Fossils, streaks in the cloud chamber, temperature gauges etc. don't say anything by themselves you're always working within a certain theory which tells you how to interpret this information. Evolution as a theory will tell you how to interpret fossils. What the commenter is mistaken about is that evolution is just a presupposition.

What a theory like evolution does is give certain predictions and explains observations and those observations manifesting gives us reason to think the theory is true.

So theories and observations have a mutual relationship summed up like this: 1. a theory implies and explains some observations 2. in this way it gives us the ability to interpret those observations 3. the observations then give us reason to think the theory is true.

...It doesn't prove the framework is correct...

Theories are going to be judged by the criteria is described above: how well they explain certain observations, predict new ones + certain theoretical virtues like simplicity, coherence, fertility etc.

The very same data the fossil now has an entire different theory because data the fossil is underdetermined...

Given what we said, its not at all a problem that several theories can explain the same data set; we don't only judge theories based on how much they cohere with the observations (that would be an incredibly low bar), we also judge them on their predictive power and theoretical virtue and how well it explains those observations. Yes both evolution and creationism can explain the same data, but one clearly does it better with less ad hoc explanations. Given these criteria evolution is obviously the winner and hence we endorse it as true.

“A presupposition like naturalism is the untestable rule book that dictates what counts as testing, evidence and data in the first place. You can test a hypothesis with data you cannot use data to test the naturalistic rulebook you used to gather that data. Justify your rulebook naturalism without circular reasoning.”

Here we have gone one more rung up the epistemic ladder. Now instead of saying that a particular theory is unjustified (like earlier) we say that our criteria of theory selections itself is unjustified; we have no reason to think a theory which has more predictive and explanatory power is better.

I think this idea is on the face of it absurd. But the commenter is making what I take to be a skeptical argument, which is reinforced by the following...

“Then when asked directing on their worldview they have this to say “TAG is the only way out of the criterion problem and the trilemma. Specifically the Orthodox Christian version. You have to go
transcendental.

Likely referring to Agrippa's trilemma: if we ask how a belief is justified we can only reply with another belief, but then we have to justify that belief in turn. It seems like then justification can go one of 3 ways; either is goes on forever (infinite regress), or it circles back to the original belief (circularity), or end in a certain belief which is not itself justified.

Saying we have to go transcendental is saying the only way out of this trilemma is through God. But that's just one (rather unconvincing) way out of the problem. Notice that we already outlined 3 answers in the description to the dilemma; either justification just does in fact go on forever (infinitism), or its circular (coherentism) or some beliefs are just foundational (foundationalism), and many philosophers have take up the task of grounding epistemology in this way without reference to god.

A particularly relevant response to the problem was penned by arguably the most famous philosopher of science of the 20th century Willard van Orman Quine in his paper Epistemology Naturalised which I strongy recommend. Quines claim is that science can take care of itself, it does not need an external first philosophy prior to it in order to justify science, for there is no such first philosophy and so worrying about circularity is pointless.

But why all this creative reconstruction, all this makebelieve? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? Such a surrender of the epistemological burden to psychology is a move that was disallowed in earlier times as circular reasoning. If the epistemologist's goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science, he defeats his purpose by using psychology or other empirical science in the validation. However, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations. If we are out simply to understand the link between observation and science, we are well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand. (Quine, 1969)

[u/After_Network_6401]

“How do you justify the knowledge based rule set framework of naturalism”

Answer: because it’s the only framework which has been proven to consistently work. Naturalism is so unchallenged among scientists that it’s almost invisible. This isn’t a failure of understanding among scientists. It’s a testimony to the fact that no other philosophical viewpoint has been able to make a credible challenge to Naturalism.

The philosophy of science and the practice of science don’t actually have that much to do with each other anymore. I’m not dissing philosophy here: just recognizing that it’s a different toolset for a different set of questions.

The philosophy of science is for talking about how we think about and talk about science. But it’s not actually useful for doing science - and I say that as someone with an interest in the philosophical questions, but also a career spanning decades of successful scientific research.

[u/knockingatthegate]

What are you asking?

[u/Jaymark-Wek]

Sort of, but their move just shifts the burden, it doesn’t dodge it. Science is fallible, sure, but TAG/“revelation” still needs assumptions too, and Truelist aside, that’s the same circularity with church clothes on.

[u/badentropy9]

I'm a laymen of STEM background. I'm agnostic and I'm an empiricist. That being said, it seems as though "science" resists what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. If there are no presuppositions in place then there is no paradigm that needs or doesn't need any shift.

[u/pyrrho314]

if only absolute knowledge counts as real knowledge, then sure, there is no knowledge... but since it's always been this way, it makes more sense to understand knowledge is provisional and theoretical and subject to paradigm changes. OH NO! How will we ever get to the moon again?!?!

[u/Edgar_Brown]

Science relies on one presupposition alone: reality is real, and we all live in it.

That’s all it needs to build the whole edifice simply by using weaponized doubt and intersubjective phenomena.

[u/Optimal-Fig-6687]

Ask him to fly on the plane moved by Spirit of God, not naturalists engines.