Naturalism-Materialism-Reductionism
From the thread "Evidence is Silent; It is Always Interpreted in the Light of Our Theories"
Post of the Month: June 2001
by Steven J.
Subject: Re: Evidence is Silent; It is Always Interpreted in the Light of Our Theories Newsgroups: talk.origins Date: June 14, 2001 Author: Steven J. Message-ID: 127ccf2e.0106132045.66ac3bb@posting.google.com
msg@cx318157-b.chspk1.va.home.com (Mike Goodrich) wrote in message news:slrn9ifpr5.1rb.msg@cx318157-c.chspk1.va.home.com...
> In article <3B26C013.8D1A46A3@fast.net>, A Pagano wrote:
>
-- [snip]
>
> > Pagano replies:
> >I'll pipe in with my usual boring drum beat: Apart from drawing some
> >low-level (and in many cases trivial) generalizations the evidence is
> >completely and utterly silent. In fact it is doubtful that any set of
> >evidence no matter how perfect or complete could uniquely define or
> >point to only the one true theory. Artificial intelligence researchers
> >have been disappointed in this regard.
> >
> >Evidence is never gathered in isolation. The gathering of evidence is
> >always preceded by the introduction of a problem to be solved and some
> >preliminary conjecture explaining the problem. It is the conjecture
> >(however preliminary) which suggests where to even look for evidence and
> >how to interpret that evidence once found. Evidence is always, always,
> >always interpreted in the light of our conjectural theories.
Charles Darwin not merely admitted, but insisted on this: evidence must be evidence for or against some hypothesis to be evidence at all. And certainly, evidence is interpreted in light of theories. The progressive refutation of various scientific assumptions, to which you so often allude, is evidence that evidence is not always interpreted as CONFIRMING these theories -- except when "creation scientists" are proposing the "theories" and evaluating the evidence.