I agree most philosophy would benefit from being tied back to human experience in the material world, ‘touching grass’ so to speak.
I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on.
I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!”
I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty.
It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.
I think Lakatos’ Research Programmes give a good structure for demarcating scientific knowledge from pseudoscience. And precisely because he provides a pragmatic method for how this should inform low level decisions about scientific funding bodies and what scientists choose to work on.
I think most people would reject his ideas because of the intuition you describe: scientists ‘feel’ like they ‘know’ their expert subject and so epistemological relativism feels dirty because they lose their delusion of objectivity. “I use fancy methods so I’m a ‘real’ scientist and my conclusions are scientific!”
I believe the issues in nutritional science, psychiatry and psychology (to name a few) are fundamentally because these sciences are hard to study, so researchers use sophisticated statistical methods to hide their lack of ‘true knowledge’ or epistemological uncertainty.
It’s why Lobotomies won a Nobel prize and all the major classes of psychiatric medication were discovered accidentally. It is a discipline made up of mostly degenerate research programmes but too much inertia to change track.