by Spearthrower wrote:Cito di Pense wrote:Spearthrower wrote:I would personally argue that the goal of science isn't to measure and describe, but ultimately to use those measurements and descriptions towards an explanatory end, but I know plenty of qualified scientists who disagree most robustly with that.
They disagree because explanation is lodged somewhere up one's filosofeezical arse. We demonstrate that something has been explained by engineering with it in such a way that it stands up on its own.
This thread is, to significant degree, a mocking of the hubris of explanation absent the use of tools. The tools that EE proponents are unable to take up are legion.
Essentially, that is my position too, except that I don't want to minimize the labourious hours of data collection that go into the formulation of explanations. In the absence of that accumulated evidence, those explanations are just ideas tossed out at random in ways more consistent with religious, supernatural, and alternative 'methodologies' rather than with science. The arbiter is still ultimately 'does the explanation work, bitch?' - does it correspond to further observations... but arriving at that explanation, or sorting through the moray of ungrounded explanations absent of any basis in data would massively slow the acquisition of knowledge.
EE proponents selectively screen out data, most obviously about subduction, when they try to hack the mass, volume, or surface area balances via an unspecified process. PT has the advantage of being based on a model whose arguments can be tested in subsequent observations whose results are predicted. Research proposals usually hint at the questions they hope to answer.
