A further reason some of us are skeptical is probably because some of us aren't using the so-called "Western" style of thinking: isolating from context, oversimplifying explanations etc... Some of us are thinking of culture as highly complex, contextual and so not easily pinned down according to those generalizations. What exactly is "the East" as a cultural entity? China, Japan and Korea? Let's set aside all the problems with bundling those three nations together as if they had some sort of common fundamental culture (which is nonsense).

I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are the same culture, but they have a shared cultural basis in the early dissemination of Chinese writing and religious texts, and in centuries of trading, in much the same way that you could argue that England and Hungary share a common western culture, based on common ideas from Greece and Rome, as well as the influence of Christianity, despite completely unrelated languages, national circumstances and boundaries, etc. Is speaking of Western or European culture to remark on the common features so weird that you can't speak of, say, the common cultural influence of Buddhism in east Asia?

Historically, at one point of time in the 20th century, Japan was THE powerhouse in go. China and Korea were much weaker comparatively. It would seem that Japan helped plant the seeds of professional go into these countries and help them become stronger. Japan also tried to help out the Western world to become stronger at go. So the question becomes, how did China and Korea became so much stronger compared with the West when they all received help from Japan? Is it due to differences in culture or thinking or perhaps other factors?

It's tricky to say that the scientific method makes verifiable predictions, because the future is unknown. Further, the capability of the scientific method is limited to the model you choose to adopt. You might have a hypothesis, after repeated trials, the hypothesis does not hold, so you adjust your hypothesis. That hypothesis seems to correspond to your observations over and over again, so you believe it's true. But then new observations make you change your mind again.

This is one approach, and to be honest, I share your viewpoint in adopting this approach.

But not everyone uses this approach to make decisions, and I don't think that it's fair to call them delusional.

For example, you might have a person that grew up all of his life being told that, if he threw salt over his back before eating dinner, he'd have good luck. Maybe he's done that all of his life, and he can recount good this that have happened to him, so he starts to believe in this superstition.

Now later, it may be the case that he throws salt over his back before eating dinner, and something really bad happens. He could take two approaches:

1.) He could think, "Hey, this is just a stupid custom that has no scientific basis. I don't believe it." I think this is a valid approach.

2.) He could think, "Well, my mom told me this was the way things worked. And all of my life, it's worked this way. It doesn't seem to be working. There must be another reason. Maybe if you throw salt over your back it works usually, but on the second Tuesday every month, it doesn't".

So sure, you can be quick to call the second approach delusional, or superstitious. But the guy has reasons and life experiences for believing the way he does.

The "scientific" approach may not seem to have personal or cultural rationale tied to it, but the fact is, everyone has their own personal and cultural backgrounds. I don't think it's right to claim that those that have a reason for believing something in a way that's not scientific are delusional.

It's entirely possible that some of these cultural and ancient superstitions have some sort of truth to them that can't be found using the scientific method.

I think it's too simplistic to simply say that these viewpoints are delusional or biased - it's just that the bias present in the scientific method is commonly accepted in modern society.

I was sick in bed all of yesterday and catching up on missed studying today and so wasn't able to respond to this for a while, but I just want to clarify that what I was calling delusional wasn't the belief in this-or-that superstition. What I was calling delusional was holding a belief for the sole reason that it makes you feel good, without any regard for its truth value.

It's just that, to some people, the way they evaluate something's "truth value" would not seem scientific to every person, and it's hard to say that their way is inferior if they are making rational decisions based on their experiences.

The theory of quantum electrodynamics has now lasted for more than fifty years, and has been tested more and more accurately over a wider and wider range of conditions. At the present time I can proudly say that there is no significant difference between experiment and theory!
Just to give you an idea of how the theory has been put through the wringer, I'll give you some recent numbers:
experiments have Dirac's number at
1.00115965221 (with an uncertainty of about 4 in the last digit); the theory puts it at
1.00115965246 (with an uncertainty of about five times as much).

To give you a feeling for the accuracy of these numbers, it comes out something like this: If you were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy, it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair. That's how delicately quantum electrodynamics has, in the past fifty years, been checked--both theoretically and experimentally. By the way, I have chosen only one number to show you. There are other things in quantum electrodynamics that have been measured with comparable accuracy, which also agree very well. Things have been checked at distance scales that range from hundred times the size of the earth down to one-hundredth the size of an atomic nucleus. These numbers are meant to intimidate you into believing that the theory is probably not too far off!

Since you persist on opening that can of worms here..


I don't think there are any other widely accepted methods except the scientific one for establishing "objective truth", but I am intruiged. What other method that draws conclusions from experiences is comparable to the scientific one in terms of credibility?

Your earlier example of the guy who thinks throwing salt over his shoulder increasing his luck is actually a theory that produces verifiable predictions about the future, so it can be tested with the scientific method. And I'm sure you would agree that the tests will actually come to the following conclusion: it's bullshit. All of it.
Now if after experiments have basically falsified his "belief" he would still cling to it, I would call him delusional.

Duhem's original case for holist underdetermination is, perhaps unsurprisingly, intimately bound up with his arguments for confirmational holism: the claim that theories or hypotheses can only be subjected to empirical testing in groups or collections, never in isolation. The idea here is that a single scientific hypothesis does not by itself carry any implications about what we should expect to observe in nature; rather, we can derive empirical consequences from an hypothesis only when it is conjoined with many other beliefs and hypotheses, including background assumptions about the world, beliefs about how measuring instruments operate, further hypotheses about the interactions between objects in the original hypothesis' field of study and the surrounding environment, etc. For this reason, Duhem argues, when an empirical prediction turns out to be falsified, we do not know whether the fault lies with the hypothesis we originally sought to test or with one of the many other beliefs and hypotheses that were also needed and used to generate the failed prediction:

Have fun.

I've read the excerpt you gave, which appears to be from the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", is that correct?

Isn't the argument just a variation on the idea that in order to conclude anything beyond Descarte's cogito ergo sum, we have to make certain ad hoc assumptions about reality?

And what alternatives to the scientific method does it propose? Because it seems to me any model of reality will have to make these kinds of assumptions, so I don't really see any better method.

(Btw, this certainly is getting slightly off topic.)

I've read the excerpt you gave, which appears to be from the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", is that correct?

the idea that a single hypothesis (such as the salt-throwing) can be straightforwardly 'verified' or 'falsified' is far too simplistic and doesn't actually describe the operations of science (or the scientific method).

If luck can't be measured, then the statement of our hypothetical simpleton doesn't mean anything in the first place.

Second, I never said it'd be straightforward, only possible.

If luck can't be measured, then the statement of our hypothetical simpleton doesn't mean anything in the first place. So I assumed we can do that (by using a fair die, playing card games, whatever).

After that we need many trials + a basic understanding of statistics to be able to interpret the results. Seems easy enough to me.

I never denied that there was cultural influence from common sources. but I do deny that there's any interesting level of common culture.

What qualifies for you as "interesting?" If there is in fact any commonality, how can you be sure that it is not relevant for playing go?

Do you take it as a given that there are no mental traits, be they genetically, culturally, or environmentally triggered, that might give people of one group an advantage in some types of mental activity over others?

Historically, at one point of time in the 20th century, Japan was THE powerhouse in go. China and Korea were much weaker comparatively. It would seem that Japan helped plant the seeds of professional go into these countries and help them become stronger. Japan also tried to help out the Western world to become stronger at go. So the question becomes, how did China and Korea became so much stronger compared with the West when they all received help from Japan? Is it due to differences in culture or thinking or perhaps other factors?