In the many discussions about the possibility of the natural sciences telling us what is real, I don’t remember anyone mentioning the vital role of abductive reasoning. Inductive and deductive reasoning were mentioned plenty of times but abductive reasoning was ignored.
My claims against regarding scientific narratives as indubitable descriptions of reality are tied to this concept. I just wasn’t aware of it until I stumbled upon it recently while lost in multi-tabbed browsing session of wikipedia. So, it’s nice to have a name for the point of faith in science–the hope that we guess correctly.
Abductive reasoning is nothing more than the hypothesis stage of the scientific method.
In scientific practice abductive conclusions are either verified using the other forms of reasoning or they are abandoned. So if you question the validity of scientifically derived results you must do it through attacking deductive and/or inductive reasoning.
Science aims to determine if our guesses were correct or not. Knowing an incorrect guess is wrong is still considered progress.
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions deals with issues similar to these.
It’s not really correct to talk about faith in science
Faith means to believe something for emotional reasons, usually related to a desire to avoid lasting death. A scientist who clings to out dated notions is just stubbornly unconvinced. This can at times, with luck, be a virtue in science. Edison was a legend of dogged stubborn experimentation, with only moderate interest in theory. This helped him when he tried 1000’s of filaments, leading to a practical bulb. It hurt him in that he just disliked AC power, and was one of the last hold outs in favor of DC distribution. He once publicly electrocuted an elephant with AC power, as a way of trying to convince the public that DC was safer.
Still, it would be wrong to say Edison had a lot of faith that DC power was better. He just had a lot of money invested in DC, so that made him a stubborn business man, leading him to be a stubborn scientist as well.
This is stubbornness, not faith, requiring no belief in the supernatural, which was not Edison’s real problem.
Faith is different than stubbornness, in that it goes way off the scale into magic nuts in the sky theories. But then again, Edison did publicly electrocute an elephant. That’s pretty nuts, however, he did not ask people to believe his motives were divine, or state the superiority of DC power was ordained from above. Thus his lame science was based on stubbornness, not faith.
When science determines that we cannot reject a guess we’re still left with a guess, not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It is what it is.