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The Opinionsphere

Science’s A Priori Assumptions

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

[Science] requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors these last few years.

The main reason I mention this is Overbye’s implicit acceptance that science has a priori assumptions – an argument I’ve had many times before. Of course, Overbye misses a few of science’s a priori assumptions – from cause-and-effect to Occam’s razor to the rules of mathematics. But he admits my point.