Friday, December 30, 2011

Article: What is Scientism? : EvolutionBlog

Empirical facts (facts about reality) and mathematical facts are very different sorts of facts. Mathematical facts are pure abstractions. They tell us the logical consequences of a formal system. But our system of mathematics is not just an arbitrary formal system. We've adopted this particularly formal system because it's proven so useful in modelling reality. However a mathematical fact tells us nothing about reality except in conjunction with a mathematical model of reality. And those mathematical models must be based on empirical observation.

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---SPSmith

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