| WereKitten said: You're still playing with words. Rationalism and scientific method work. They are proven day-in day-out by billions of people. I don't need to have blind faith in the method, I can assess its utility by its results and live with it as the temporary best tool. Especially because it's a self-correcting tool. Again, please point me to an example of failure of the scientific method or of rationalism, since you claimed such cases exist. Second, I actually read Taleb's "The Black Swan", and it is not about refuting induction or causality at large. Strict induction has never been considered a source of absolute scientific results. Popper formalized the argument against induction in scientific theories, but obviously the problem dates back to early empiric schools. |
Rationalism and the scientific method work... when you have the right conditions for them to do so. When they do, as in the case of innovation and the arts, or understanding human behavior, they are limited. Also, in the scientific method, the origin of a hypothesis is not rational at all. It will usually come as a flash of insight. There is a degree of irrational in the scientific method.
A place that practical testing of how things work is economics, and you see that there is irrationality in how economies work. Here is a show Nova ran on this:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777/
