All Science Is Anecdotal

The masses may be woefully ignorant of the nature of logic, but, despite the fact that science clearly is treated as the forefront of Western civilization rather than reason, they are also woefully ignorant of scientific epistemology.  I do not merely mean this in the ways I have addressed here many times before [1], but I mean that people who claim to love the "certainty" of science usually accept whatever scientific ideas are said to be peer reviewed or favored by popular scientists.  As anyone who chooses scientific autonomy over scientists' claims knows, science is about empirical observation, not hearsay!

No one needs to hear from a scientist before they can make personal observations about gravity, decay, and general physics on their own--everyday experiences provide some empirical information about these things.  It is not as if no one could perceive gravity unless they had a book, an internet article, or a scientist with them!  Scientific events are a fundamental part of sensory life, and all one must do to understand at least basic correlations is to look for them and rationally reflect on what one finds.  However, to simply accept a scientific claim from someone else as likely to be true without direct experience is irrational.

Although many people seem to accept the claims of scientists about common phenomena like gravity with little to no pushback or contemplation, the fallacies are compounded when the accepted claims are about things that one cannot even perceive under normal circumstances.  The quantum world and the solar system, both of which are completely unobservable from the ordinary person's perspective, cannot be known indirectly through the hearsay of others, and yet to admit that one cannot know anything beyond what reason can prove and what one's own sensory experiences reveal is considered intellectual heresy.

If someone says they want "scientific evidence" as opposed to "personal anecdotes," they show that they have little to no understanding of what science is--and that they are completely willing to agree with what someone says about scientific events based upon their reputation.  The scientist who spends his or her days repeatedly observing the same phenomena does not derive scientific ideas from anything other than personal experiences (and, hopefully, rationalistic analysis of them), just as an "ordinary" person has no basis for expecting scientific events apart from personal experiences.  There is not such thing as science that is not based on subjective experience: all science is anecdotal.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/12/how-western-culture-overestimates.html