Arjen wrote:Yes, I think this is a subversion of science somehow. Perhaps on purpose.
OK, So when you said this:
...scientists nowadays just produce likelyhood...
I guess you meant that scientists in the olden days produced certainties?
If I could, I would pin it on the CCP, sadly, I can't!
Yes, in my experience a lot of people here have a particular single issue that they mostly want to discuss. In your case it seems to me the thesis that western mainstream media deliberately don't print stories about bad stuff done by the Chinese Communist Party. But I like to see a bit of good healthy self-mockery!
Rousseau famously uses the log in the water. We observe a corner in the log, yet in reality the log is straight. So, we worked out that the light is refracted on the different medium (water), which lead to the defining of the refraction index. Instead of using the observation just like that, someone made multiple and worked out the relation. Rousseau uses that as an explanation of rationalism.
That's one example of the process of taking a set of individual observations and finding the patterns in them - the things that they all share - to come up with a proposed objective reality. Rousseau, I guess, picks that as a nice clear example, but any set of individual observations would do. You could, for example, use the example of a circular coin seen at an angle. (I think Russell uses that example.)
So you think modern scientists don't do things like that anymore? If so, that would be a strange view to take. Doing things like that is the very definition of what science does.