Epistemic priority: Difference between revisions

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 For example, the trajectory of a missile may be accounted equally well, in theory, for by special relativity, Newtonian mechanics, or the “gaze heuristic”.
-Which, all other things being equal, should we prefer? Does one have, as a piece of credentialised technical knowledge about the world, “epistemic priority” over the others?
+Which, [[ceteris paribus|all other things being equal]], should we prefer? Does one have, as a piece of credentialised technical knowledge about the world, “epistemic priority” over the others?
-You may not be surprised to hear opinions tend to be divided with experts in competing magisteria tending to talk their own book.
+You may not be surprised to hear opinions tend to be divide, cleanly, along [[magisteria]]l lines, with experts in competing programmes preferring their own. Few experts are agnostic. Epistemic scepticism is left to philosophers. The JC thinks this a pity.
-Some will appeal to the related concept of [[Occam’s razor]] — a [[heuristic]] to determine which explanation to go with — but it is a rule of thumb, not scientific discourse: it is a [[lazy]], nut useful, fudge. It has no ''epistemic priority'' either.
+Some domain masters — can we call them that? — will appeal to the related concept of [[Occam’s razor]] — a clever [[heuristic]] to determine the easiest explanation to go with — but it is just a rule of thumb and has no scientific rigour of its own. A  [[lazy]], if useful, fudge but it has no ''epistemic priority'' either.
-Why does it matter? If it works, it works, doesn’t it?
+Why does it even matter? If it works, it works, doesn’t it?  Some — your correspondent included — would say quite so.
-Some — your correspondent included, would say quite so.
-But there is a strand of scientism that sees science as an enterprise converging on “reality”, or “the truth” to whose program progress, and betterment, is an important quality. If we cannot be sure our theories are ascending a grand epistemic priority, they are worthless to us — diverting but, well, literally, diverting.
+But there is a strand of [[scientism]] that sees science as an enterprise converging on “reality”, or “the truth”, and not just “a handy set of tools for the time being”. To their program, progress — betterment against an abstract gold ideal — is an important quality. If we cannot be sure our theories are ascending a grand epistemic priority, they are worthless to us — diverting but, well, literally, diverting.
 On this theory there is at the top of that grand staircase (often the metaphor is literally inverted, and the progress described as a descent to fundamental structural engineering in the basement, but a stairway to heaven seems to us a much better image) a grand unifying theory of everything. when we have that, then — well, supporters of the grand unifying theory haven't carried on that thought experiment. But notice how it cleaves to the idea the universe is a bounded, time-bound, ''[[finite]]'' system.