re: #17 Decatur Deb

Non-argument.

“Natural science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. At older universities, long-established Chairs of Natural Philosophy are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Modern meanings of the terms science and scientists date only to the 19th century. The naturalist-theologian William Whewell was the one who coined the term “scientist”. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the origin of the word to 1834. Before then, the word “science” meant any kind of well-established knowledge and the label of scientist did not exist. Some examples of the application of the term “natural philosophy” to what we today would call “natural science” are Isaac Newton’s 1687 scientific treatise, which is known as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait’s 1867 treatise called Treatise on Natural Philosophy which helped define much of modern physics.”
-wiki

I think this is a valid observation. What we view as science today is simply the subset of philosophy that deals with empirical reality and accepts certain limits on the kinds of reasoning to be used.

The enormous success of science using these philosophical ground rules pretty much means it is pointless to use other kinds of reasoning for issues that fall within the domain of science.

However, there is much that philosophers deal with that is not strictly limited to empirical reality, and for such issues limiting the reasoning being used to what is scientifically acceptable is often useless.