Teotwawki: Okay If We Confirm That Tomorrow?

What if the science of prediction is a fictive process and nothing more? Is the future, then, even if loosely knowable, specifically unpredictable?

- Kajal Basu

There is little disputing Robert S. Cohen’s statement that “much of our intellectual life, and increasingly large portions of our social and political life, rest on the assumption that we (or, if not we ourselves, then someone whom we trust in these matters) can tell the difference between science and its counterfeit”.

But what if we cannot? What if the respect we pay to the science of prediction is respect to a fictive process and little more? What if the untrained human mind is unable to tell the difference between “science and its counterfeit” ( just as it is unable to tell the difference between magic and its counterfeit, sleight ­of ­hand [essentially, between one counterfeit and its counterfeit])?

In predictive mechanisms (as in just about everything else today), the problem is that of boundaries. The demarcation problem in the philosophy of science seeks to address what is science and what is non­science (including anti­science, pseudoscience, beliefs, the arts and literature). This article disdains, by virtue of what it focuses on, anti­scientific predictive mechanisms. By virtue of the same, it must therefore depend upon Larry Laudan’s prescription that “above all, to have science one must have apodictic certainty.” (‘The Demise of the Demarcation Problem’, in Cohen, R.S.; Laudan, L., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum)