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> you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments

No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data.

> logical positivism

The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).




Then it's a common mistake that many scientists and technologists make, which further informs their worldviews and ideologies.


Yes, that's true. Many people, including scientists, don't actually understand how the scientific method works.

However, there is also another possibility, and that is that the word "knowledge" is being used in two different ways. "Knowledge" in science is often used as a shorthand for "The best explanation we currently have in hand, one which has so far withstood all attempts to falsify it." This is different from the kind of knowledge studied by epistemology, but it is a not-entirely-unreasonable use of the word.


How do you define "explanation"?



Speech which conjures in the mind of the listener a model of the world with which they can make deductions about their sensory experiences




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