Yesterday I argued that the Powers Beyond Science are actually a standard and necessary part of the social process of science. In particular, scientists must call upon their powers of individual rationality to decide what ideas to test, in advance of the sort of definite experiments that Science demands to bless an idea as confirmed. The ideal of Science does not try to specify this process—we don't suppose that any public authority knows how individual scientists should think—but this doesn't mean the process is unimportant.

A readily understandable, non-disturbing example:

A scientist identifies a strong mathematical regularity in the cumulative data of previous experiments. But the corresponding hypothesis has not yet made and confirmed a novel experimental prediction—which his academic field demands; this is one of those fields where you can perform controlled experiments without too much trouble. Thus the individual scientist has readily understandable, rational reasons to believe (though not with probability 1) something not yet blessed by Science as public knowledge of humankind.

Noticing a regularity in a huge mass of experimental data, doesn't seem all that unscientific. You're still data-driven, right?

But that's because I deliberately chose a non-disturbing example. When Einstein invented General Relativity, he had almost no experimental data to go on, except the precession of Mercury's perihelion. And (AFAIK) Einstein did not use that data, except at the end.

Einstein generated the theory of Special Relativity using Mach's Principle, which is the physicist's version of the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle. You begin by saying, "It doesn't seem reasonable to me that you could tell, in an enclosed room, how fast you and the room were going. Since this number shouldn't ought to be observable, it shouldn't ought to exist in any meaningful sense." You then observe that Maxwell's Equations invoke a seemingly absolute speed of propagation, c, commonly referred to as "the speed of light" (though the quantum equations show it is the propagation speed of all fundamental waves). So you reformulate your physics in such fashion that the absolute speed of a single object no longer meaningfully exists, and only relative speeds exist. I am skipping over quite a bit here, obviou...

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