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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

> Given its total inability to prove positive statements

This is recognized in the natural sciences, but not in the pure sciences. Considering the context, I thought it was clear that I was not talking about pure sciences, and that I was rather referring to the natural or social sciences.

There is no source of knowledge, method or tool that surpasses science in epistemological authority. That does not mean it gets us to a total and absolute truth, it just means it's the least-bad way possible of knowing things.

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> There is no source of knowledge, method or tool that surpasses science in epistemological authority. That does not mean it gets us to a total and absolute truth, it just means it's the least-bad way possible of knowing things.

What do you base this statement on? How do you know science is the strongest possible way of knowing?

What do you mean by "science"? I may be misunderstanding you due to a divergence in our understandings of the word.

I’m not using any fancy or special definition, I use the word “science” much like it is used here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

So science is a method of constructing falsifiable hypotheses about how to predict phenomena reliably?

Any response to my other questions?

epgui doesn't know what he's talking about. Science in it's purest form can only falsify things. Absolutely nothing can be proven correct. There is no "pure" science. That's garbage.

What's going on is epgui likely mixed up logic, math and science. In math and logic things can be proven because math and logic is a game where you make up axioms and prove theorems... but in science and reality, nothing can be proven.

Basically by posting that wikipedia article he proved you right. and demonstrated to you that he doesn't know what science truly is.

English is my second language, and I believe the correct term for what I called “pure science” is “formal science”. In French, it’s common to talk of “sciences pures” in contrast to “sciences appliquées”, so it’s possible this is where that came from. Thank you for pointing this out!

I do have 12 years of postsecondary education in the applied/natural sciences, so I think that first sentence of yours is perhaps a little exaggerated.

In English science exclusively refers to science as Wikipedia defined it.

Formal science is a rarely used term. In fact much of the (English) academic world doesn't consider logic, math, or computer science to be actual sciences. The term is basically unheard of. You may find some people who use the term but most people don't know about it.

The reason is simple, the nature of what science is, is not discussed by scientists. It is more discussed by philosophers or French people.

If you weren't suffering from a language issue, I would indeed be 100% correct that you don't know what you're talking about; but given your language impairment and your claim that French academics in common parlance demarcate a difference in sciences between formal and applied it makes sense that you can make this mistake.

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