315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I always like to say about science and how it gets done is that science never proves things. This is something that is an important feature of science, especially in the modern world, where what science does, how it reaches conclusions, how trustworthy it is, these are all under contestation by different parts of society.
So it's important to understand what science is and how it actually reaches its conclusions. And the claim that science never proves things, which is something that most scientists would go along with me on, comes from a comparison to real proof in mathematics or for that matter in logic. You know, most scientists have taken some math classes, at least enough to know what it means to prove something in the old-fashioned sense of Euclid and geometry or Aristotle and logic proving a conclusion from some well-articulated premises. In the philosophical study of logic, this is known as deductive reasoning.
You have some premises and you reach a conclusion. And science just doesn't go that way, right? Science looks at the world, it looks at all sorts of things in the world. And it tries to figure out what the patterns are that the world follows, always knowing that tomorrow you might do a new experiment that will overturn your best guess as to what the pattern was, or maybe someone will do something as simple as just thinking of a better pattern, right? A theoretical physicist coming up with a better idea for what the laws of physics really are.
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