But why should we believe any of these assumptions to be true?
And how did we come up with them in the first place? Did scientists discover
them like they discovered Pluto or invent them like they invented jet engines?
The fact of the matter is that science and the scientific method didn’t
drop out of nowhere. There’s a framework of thought behind science that
goes beyond the methods of science. It’s a set of pre-scientific and pre-philosophical
insights accepted by the first scientists.
We call them “meta-scientific” and by that we mean
a principle or reality that is fundamental to science but cannot be tested with
the methods of science. The domain of the meta-scientific includes
- things that have no physical characteristics (e.g., consciousness, abstract
thought),
- claims that can be proved or disproved by reasoning but not by experiment
(e.g., are our minds capable of knowing?) and
- questions about the nature of existence (e.g., what does it mean for
something to “be”).
A classic meta-scientific issue is the belief that the universe
exists. This can only be assumed by science and not proven because every physical
experiment will necessarily assume the world exists. A proof for the reality
of the world (as laid out by Madhvacharya, for instance) is necessarily meta-scientific.
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