Today's post, When Science Can't Help was originally published on 15 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
If you have an idea, Science tells you to test it experimentally. If you spend 10 years testing the idea and the result comes out negative, Science slaps you on the back and says, "Better luck next time." If you want to spend 10 years testing a hypothesis that will actually turn out to be right, you'll have to try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust you to do: think rationally, and figure out the answer before you get clubbed over the head with it.
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That is not quite the model of natural science I have in my mind. Yes, experimental testing is used to check models' validity, but I never said that the results of this testing are determined by a single coherent whole 'X'. The model of having such an 'X' works well in classical physics, including the unfortunate dude from the Simple Truth. It does not work well in QM. Specifically, it makes one ask questions like "what is the momentum and position of a particle, really?" (incidentally, this one EY has dealt with quite well in his QM sequence). Unfortunately, the mental model of a fixed underlying territory keeps leading one astray with questions like "do many worlds exist?", "does wave function collapse violate relativity?". Once you reformulate the questions as "what predictions does the MWI make?" and "How do we detect violation of relativity in the collapse model?", the questions are immediately dissolved.
If all we have is observations and models and predictions, and the whole enterprise of trying to reason about whatever might underlie those observations is misguided, presumably abstract assertions like "there exists a single X" or "there exists more than one X" are also misguided except insofar as they can be grounded out in differential predictions about future events.
That is, I don't see how the distinction you're drawing here between those two superficially distinct accounts is at all meaningful on your ontology.