Today's soundtrack is Demon Hunter: Outlive.
Due to an internet outage caused by my landlords' renovations, I'm doing another chapter of nonfiction today. I'll read chapter two of Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, "Epistemology: How You Know What You Know."
According to Feder, epistemology is the study of knowledge. We correct information in two ways: directly (through personal observations or experiences), or indirectly, by being told information. Contrary to popular belief, the latter method is the more reliable, but only if observations are carried out scientifically.
Scientists operate under four assumptions: "There is a real and knowable universe[, ]The universe[...] operates according to certain understandable rules or laws[, ]These laws are immutable[... , ]These laws can be discerned, studied, and understood by people through careful observation, experimentation, and research" (p. 13).
Scientists use two logical processes in their work: induction and deduction. The former uses specifics to find generalities: the latter uses specifics to find generalities. Objective and unbiased obsessions are essential to good science. Creativity and imagination are important for coming up with hypotheses.
For a hypothesis to be valid scientifically, if must be testable. The steps in science are observation, hypothesize generally, hypothesize specifically, and test the hypothesis. Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest of our hypotheses is often the best one; this helps us to rule out ridiculous hypotheses.
Scientific understanding is not in a state of constant growth; science plateaus for periods of time until a paradigm shifter changes our understanding of things. For this reason, we cannot really prove a hypothesis, but we can hold to its findings as a theory until something better comes along.
