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By the same token you could argue that science is less fundamental than philosophy because science includes gobs of relatively useless, unimportant information like the latin names of various extinct bugs that are no longer relevant to any current work. My point there is just that your argument doesn't really hold up since you can apply it to either side.

Philosophy is the logically framed exploration of various paradigms of thought. This is more fundamental to the human ability to understand the world than raw data because it allows us to devise tests for our interpretations of that data and put the results to good use. Without logic and a foundational understanding of rationalism and the fallibility of the human mind, chemistry would still be alchemy.

That's my point. We have people thinking they understand science in this day and age who really have no idea what they're talking about and thus end up in pseudoscientific dead ends all the time. This is because they haven't incorporated the foundational philosophies of science and therefore lack the mental discipline to practice it. You even see this at the institutional level with labs never producing follow up studies to show results are reproducible, thus rendering their initial research moot all for the sake of crass capitalistic gain. Likewise you see this in the weakening of the integrity of the scientific press, with their constant slew of clickbait headlines.

The issue with the decay of scientific rigor in western culture is fundamentally a philosophical one.

Do you see my point? Individuals and societies fail to do good science without well-considered philosophy. The converse is not true. Science depends on philosophy, not the other way around.



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