Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.
Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.
1. A belief that the scientific method will definitely approach reality (a realist/pragmatist claim)
2. A belief that the current consensus is right - (but it could be disclaimed)
3. A belief that science will explain everything, so one could discard other studies, such as philosophy or theology.
Each of these positions can be disputed and may be wrong (especially since they were not acquired by the scientific method, but arrived at by philosophical thought), so to some extent you need some "faith" to accept these statements to be true.
No scientist believes position 2 in general. Regarding particular subject matters and well-confirmed theories, on the other hand, it's pretty much uncontroversial. No cell phone would work and no plane would fly if the underlying physical theories were flat-out false.
Position 3 is probably analytically true, too. The idea that there is something that can in principle not be explained by taking a close scientific (=skeptic, methodical, experimental, precise) look at it hardly makes any sense.
My point 2 was not supposed to mean that current theory was wrong as much as there (most likely will) be a more accurate better theory that will replace current ones. No-one disputes that (non-Microsoft) cell phones work. The problem lies on the philosophical side - Newtonian mechanics caused a big problem in that it was quite strongly suggestive of determinism. But more underlying theories, such as QM make the situation more difficult and complex. Assuming the current or fashionable theory of the time is correct is very likely to lead to a temporary or fashionable philosophy.
Position 3 - Science is an empirical study of reality - it cannot in any way explain why it is not some other reality, for example. If it is governed by logic/maths, unless every mathematical construct has physical existence (which is a rather weird and unrealistic idea), you cannot explain why this mathematical construct has existence and another does not. You may argue that other studies may be pointless, but you definitely cannot claim analytically and for certain that science can ever explain everything - so this is the point at which you are bringing in an unreasonable faith in this case. And science without study of philosophical implications is rather shallow and cannot give a reasonable mind satisfaction (not that philosophy is satisfying).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction
FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.
As an introduction, Alan F. Chalmers' What Is This Thing Called Science? is good. It covers Popper in chapters 5 to 7 (Introduction & Naive Falsificationism, Sophisticated Falsificationism, Limitations). Then it moves on (as it were) to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Imre Lakatos' Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (great short read, btw, applying those ideas to maths: Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations), and Feyerabend's Against Method. Chalmers then covers Bayesianism, new experimentalism, the nature of scientific laws, and scientific realism.
They've all pointed out problems with Popper's demarcation criterion. Not sure there's really a good catchy replacement, though. It seems to amount to "it's complicated".
One of the problems with Popper's account is the following: an observation is never about only one hypothesis, but about it and a whole set of auxiliary hypotheses. So, if your observation does not line up with the prediction, do you throw out the theory, or some auxiliary hypothesis? (Eg, Uranus didn't move as predicted, so Newton's physics was wrong. But wait, it was not a problem with Newton's physics, but there was another planet, Neptune.) Quine's notion of a "web of belief" captures that quite nicely - you don't just take one hypothesis, test it, and drop it if falsified, but you adjust the whole edifice such that it becomes coherent again. See [1].
Not to contradict anything you've said, but my original message above was in response to something very different than I think you're talking about. I see a lot of comments where people seem to treat Science as some unquestionable list of facts and treat Scientists reverently. It's like they've made a religion out of it and don't dare question the priests - which is ironic/silly when they're refuting conventional religions.
Anyways, maybe my current view is a little too hard line on good science relying on falsification, but I still reject the notion that any scientific belief is verifiable / provable. A given theory may be the best we have, but a new piece of information could change it radically.
All I wanted to add is that things are more complicated than just that one demarcation line, and philosophy of science has not stood still over the last half century.
What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong.
So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models.
Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes?
This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it.
So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles.
You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.
I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap.
Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.
Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
One would have to constrain the definition of "the universe" to a tautological one in order for science, the careful use of rigorous empirical analysis, to be the best at investigating it.
We use other forms of analysis to study different things, forms that may share some aspects with science, but aren't quite the same. Some things just aren't amenable to scientific study. The humanities, for instance.
Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
Argumentum ad consequentiam or appeal to consequences.
Once you let go of thinking that truth is knowable you'll realize that there is some faith that you have.
It's not in science per-se; but it might be faith that you exist. That you can reasonably conceive of thoughts. That those thoughts order the world and that the world that you perceive is a representation not unduly clouded. That the actions of your being are guided by your own will.
Truth might not be knowable in an absolute sense, but you can use these little starting points of faith then come to appreciate that there is a truth continuum and science is a good approach to discovering knowledge.
Philosophy seems so stupid before you start learning it, but it really is beautiful and I regret not being able to pour over it more.
What characterizes an AaC is the following structure: if X were true then the consequences would be good/bad; therefore X is (probably) true/false.
So if eli_gottlieb were saying "I believe in science because it would be lovely if science were right", that would be an AaC. But that's not at all what he's saying.
The form of his argument is more like this: "by assuming X we can arrive at a bunch of conclusions, and they consistently seem to be correct ones; therefore X is probably true". And that is (a rough sketch of) a pretty good argument.
(There are nits to pick -- more with my paraphrase than with Eli's original. For instance, science isn't a bunch of propositions so much as it's a way of trying to find truths, so "believing in science" isn't so much "believing that X" as "endorsing X as a method". And "... therefore X is probably true" isn't quite the right thing; "... and this constitutes evidence for X" is better. Etc.)
In the seems.
But: If you define "faith" broadly enough then sure, everything with any element of belief to it involves "faith". Derive everything rigorously from axioms? That means having "faith" in your axioms! Do literally anything else at all? That means taking a step at some point that doesn't have a watertight logical justification, so it's "faith"! -- So, sure, Eli's argument (or at least my sketchy reconstruction of it) involves an element of "faith", just like literally every other argument anyone could ever possibly make.
I guess this is what you mean by denying "that truth is knowable". If by "knowable" you mean "... with literally no room for any sort of uncertainty" then I vigorously agree with you -- but I have the impression (perhaps wrongly) that you were offering this as some sort of correction or education for eli_gottlieb, and I see no reason to think he needs it. All he's said is that he believes in science because it works, and that is perfectly consistent with taking "believe" to mean "accept as our current best approximation, to the best of our knowledge, to the truth, with the understanding that later discoveries might change our opinions greatly" or something of the sort.
But my core argument here is that we have no starting point. If you want to call them axioms that's fine, but I'm not here to quibble about language. Even if we had no experience of senses and minds leading to erroneous perceptions and thoughts, we would still have no way to prove that our minds are reliable. At best we would have smaller priors. But quite the opposite, we routinely encounter evidence of erroneous perceptions and thoughts. In dreams, lunatics shouting on the street, or our seemingly invisible optic nerve.
The problem with saying:
> Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
Is first defining faith incorrectly[0] and then second by appealing to its outcome as a measure for its justification. Theologians manipulate their mental state with their own methods. When they say they encounter manifestations of the divine and say they have a rational reason for their religious beliefs by saying "it works!" they're doing the same thing.
Only by humbly admitting that our starting point requires some first acceptance can we then make progress. If you want to take it as an axiom that your mind is reliable, that's fine for you, but it isn't something that's necessarily true. I love Russell, but when he tries to break out of this by calling solipsism a self-refuting idea he's being intellectually dishonest. He was more honest when he was younger and he said solipsism is boring. And there[1] we fully agree.
[0] Faith is about mental state, not action. From Google dictionary: "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something."
[1] With the axiomatic qualifications / faith.
And the rest of us are saying: you don't need a foundationalist epistemology to have an epistemology.
I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith. We have evidence of derangement all around us and it takes faith to proceed as though our actions are our own and are unclouded. From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason. But there is no escape because the mind is the centre of all investigation.
Does the infantry man's faith in ballistic charts affect where a mortar will land? Yes it turned out that Newtonian physics doesn't describe absolute truth, but it sure is useful if you need to blow that enemy up over on that hill.
> one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
An interesting thought experiment, but what practical use can I apply it to?
btw I'm not implying that only lines of inquiry that result in practical uses are worthwhile, but, science for the most part is related to this.
I guess there is a distinction to be drawn between faith and blind faith. "Faith" in the atomic model allowed prediction of elements that had not yet been discovered. That faith was rewarded when the elements turned up exactly where expected (even though the orbital model of electrons turned out not to be the absolute truth). "Faith" in Einsteins theories required a belief in time dilation. Turns out we can't have GPS without accounting for it.
This is quite different to, for example, religious faith which so far has not had any of these predictive powers.
Could you please define "mere" truth?
>From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
Nonetheless, that probability can be very low, putting us firmly in normal epistemological territory and not requiring any "faith". In fact, millions of people regularly make the rational, but clouded, assessment that they are too drunk to drive, and take a taxi home.
(Also, from a Bayesian perspective, the form of the generative model and priors is up to the experimenter. From a formal epistemology perspective, you can either try to designate some optimal universal prior, or you can take a variational approach and simply say you want to minimize KL divergence of your predictive posterior from your available data.)
My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.
Knowing your great grandmother's nickname doesn't significantly affect your life, and assuming your mother isn't a compulsive liar, there's little reason to doubt her. Furthermore, it also strikes me as the kind of information that would probably be passed down intact because it's easy to remember.
faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians"
So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading