Thank you, Yazata; that is very insightful.
Thank
you for the compliment.
I'm wondering if what others are getting at is that the scientific process is necessary for the ''construction'' of a knowledge base? (of any subject mater, really)
I don't want to put words into their mouths. But yes, I sense that's exactly what some of them are saying. And I think that they are wrong.
For one thing, I don't believe that there even
is a single "scientific process". (We've had several previous threads about that.) For another, I don't think that we learn most of what we know by practicing any sort of science.
Even most of the content of science isn't typically learned by "the scientific process". With the exception of the topic of their own research, most scientists learn whatever science they know through taking university classes, reading textbooks, reading papers and in conversation with other scientists.
With laypeople, that's pretty much all there is. No experiments, no laboratories, no hypothesis testing. Just authorities.
I'm sure that there will be a reasonable objection from some direction at this point that the scientific knowledge was
originally obtained by use of some scientific process. Which might indeed be true (in some cases at least).
But not always and not entirely. Physics makes great use of mathematics, to the point where the mathematics and the physics become indistinguishable and inseparable. ('Manifolds', 'Hermitians', 'Eigenvalues'... how were these originally obtained? Not in laboratories.) Mathematics doesn't justify itself by employing experimental confirmation, it makes use of
proofs and
derivations. (Those pages full of incomprehensible hieroglyphs.) The strength of proofs is that they are a succession of simple logical steps. So how are the logical steps justified? They are just
obvious! How could they
not be correct? (Truth tables might be produced here to try to show that there's no logical possibility of them being wrong.) But ultimately, it's an appeal to intuition.
(Most of the explanations in a university classroom are the professor trying to lead students to a point where the students' own intuition kicks in: "Oh right,
now I see it!" But those of a more philosophical bent aren't always going to be satisfied with that, so that we get epistemological problems.)
And as the history of science shows, the details of how scientific ideas were originally arrived at in the first place is often very complex, historically contingent and messy. Just look at all the fits, starts and controversies that went into arriving at the account of photosynthesis that we find in our textbooks today (it took 100 years):
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-P...t_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1579708850
Having said that, my point is the rather different one that the vast majority of people who claim to know the ostensible truths of science had nothing to do with initially producing that knowledge themselves and didn't learn it the stereotypical "scientific method" way. Yet they are still said to 'know' these things.
Seen from that perspective, religion and science aren't all that dissimilar.
Perhaps some monastics practiced very assiduous
samatha meditation and achieved some of the higher
jhanas. Regardless of what we think of the jhanas, we can still say that they learned that particular meditation techniques lead to particular subjective results and that this was indeed confirmed by successive generations of monastics. (Similar examples can probably be taken from contemplative Christianity, Muslim sufism and certainly from Hindu yoga.)
But today most Buddhists don't practice these disciplines (they were always kind of the province of monastics, though Zen tried to democratize them I guess) and they accept them on authority, believe in them and claim to know about them merely because their tradition speaks of them.
