gcthomas said:
Just one assumption, really, and a defensible one at that.
You really believe that the equation of the totality of science and the totality of reality rests upon one assumption? I can list a few just off my sleeve:
-It rests on an epistemology strongly in favor in empiricism at the cost of rationalism.
-It more or less ignores the entire field of hermeneutics
-It assumes a naive subject-object structure of reality. An object being accurately and disinterestingly represented in a subject.
-It assumes classical realistic view as opposed to critical realistic or instrumentalisic view of science.
-It assumes a correspondence theory of truth
-It assumes a particular relationship between language, propositions and concepts as well as how they relate to 'reality'.
I do not disagree with all of these and some of them are closely linked together, but they are philosophical assumptions (that can be argued for or against)
Sorry gcthomas, it is quite clear that you are not very familiar with this field. I can only give you the same advise that you would give a creationist that butchers science, go familiarize yourself with the actual discussions and literature of the field.
Are you suggesting that philosophical foundational principles must be deducible from the philosophy itself? That would make all philosophies self-contradictory, a naïve and largely ridiculous idea surely.
The methodology of philosophy is simply reason, it is not as clearly defined as the scientific method is. It is simply equivocation to say that both philosophy and science is methodology. If you dismantle the basis of philosophical enterprise, you dismantle all rational discourse. The arguments against it end up being self-contradictory, since even an argument against its validity would depend on the very thing it seeks to falsify, and would itself be an exercise of philosophy.
The scientific method on the other hand is a specialized method, designed to focus on particular aspects of reality, simply ignoring certain questions. That methodology could in theory be criticized without a contradiction like the one above. A part of the definition of that methodology is that it cannot answer the kind of questions that falls in under philosophy. It is this limitation that makes the methodology so efficient at what it seeks to do. The problem is when people forget that it is a methodology and equates methodology with ontology.
I have no qualms with the scientific method in itself. I do however think that the claim that science equals the totality of reality is problematic to say the least.
Your comparison has another problem. In no way did I claim that all scientific theories are self-contradictory due to the nature of the scientific methodology ("That would make all philosophies self-contradictory"). I merely pointed out the limits of the methodology.
