YoungXanto t1_itvklp5 wrote
Reply to comment by civil_beast in Logical positivism does not dispense with metaphysics, as it aimed to. It merely proposes a different kind of metaphysics, in which natural sciences take the privileged position once occupied by rationalist metaphysics. by IAI_Admin
Even the hard sciences are the domains of inferred causality.
Hume remarks about billiard balls
>if I see one billiard ball rolling toward another, how do I know that the second ball will move when it is struck?
That is, experience is a necessary precursor to knowledge. And our observations are limited to only the confines of the single experiment from which they emerge. Repeated measurements add evidence of a causal outcome, but the state space of our observations is necessarily a subspace of the entire space of observable outcomes and we also assume the state space is time-invariant. We can therfore never be absolutely certain about anything because we can never be absolutely certain about the space we haven't sampled (which is admittedly a bit of a tautology)
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