tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1641594120121818884.post2882953446919126956..comments2024-01-28T16:22:56.756-08:00Comments on CFZ-CANADA: Scientific CryptozoologyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1641594120121818884.post-2969289343207847012012-10-30T10:08:53.787-07:002012-10-30T10:08:53.787-07:00This article has a pretty bizarre grasp of what sc...This article has a pretty bizarre grasp of what science is. Firstly there is no such thing as a purely deductive science save pure mathematics which perhaps should not be thought of as science at all.<br /> <br />*All* scientists (who are not pure mathematicians) use induction all the time. Induction is the basis of statistics and all generalisations we make. We also use deduction but much less than induction. There is no distinction between deductive and inductive scientists. "The" scientific method involves induction (perhaps it owes more to 17th century philosophers than Aristotle though. Pierce defined abduction not Aristotle). No scientist I know would be uneasy at the use of induction (some might be less keen on abduction but scientists use that too - especially palaentologists). All good scientists understand about stochasticity and that their results are tentative and uncertain. <br /><br />There is absolutely no reason normal science cannot study unknowns. Science does that all the time! And we do more than just liken knowns to unknowns, we estimate unknowns e.g. dark energy and dark matter, forensic science, species diversity etc. Science would not have progressed very far if we just likened unknowns to knowns. <br /><br />"I am in no way discarding the fundamentals of science."<br />But you are. Supernatural hypotheses are hypotheses of last resort, they explain nothing as they throw up many more questions than they answer. Scientists will invoke new entities but are reluctant to do so except in the case of overwhelming evidence as it violates Occam's Razor. Because if you don't use Ockham's Razor and accept a supernatural solution anything goes, anything, not just one particular favoured supernatural explanation, but an infinity of them and we have no way of choosing between them. Loch Ness Monster is a ghost? Maybe or maybe it is a radio-controlled model controlled by goblins who can make it dematerialise at will. What rule can distinguish those hypotheses once Occam's Razor is discarded? Invoking the supernatural is not the progressive broadmindedness of a new type of science but rather an act of methodological desperation. <br /><br />I find it funny that I have encountered two groups of people with wholly different world views (ultraskeptics and paracryptozoologists, to use Beckjord's term) who both think cryptozoological data is not really amenable to normal scientific investigation. It is, cryptozoologists just need to show a bit of systematic (not supernatural) methodological innovation. Tullimonstrumhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02594679898910304307noreply@blogger.com