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TimS comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong
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Isn't this what EY argues for at the end of QM sequence? He seems to think there are ways of knowing things when empirical evidence is insufficient to resolve the dispute.
Right, that's where he loses me every time. We disagree on what "knowing" means.
Whereas I say that EY's position in the QM sequence would be right - if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.
Of course, I think your position on "knowing" is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn't pay rent at the engineer's bench does not mean it doesn't matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.
I'll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.
Well, we agree on something. Just to clarify, my instrumentalist approach comes from the frustration of not being able to argue "which model is correct?" without tying correctness to testability. I was a naive realist a year or so ago, before I started reading this forum regularly.
Sure - falsifiability is the key issue.
I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I'm an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn't go far enough in his explanation of the difference.
Is there a way to unambiguously test this assertion?