Most science is a broadly inductive process, meaning that the tools used to develop proof within certain other scientific fields (mathematics and logic) are only of limited use inasmuch as they are equally broadly deductive. Without delving too deeply into the relation between mathematics and logic (Russell and Whitehead did that) one might complain that deductive processes are essentially tautological; that is, one can rearrange data for the purposes of clarification but that relatively little new "knowledge" is generated. (See Wittgenstein on the topic - maybe he'll hurt your head less than he does mine).
Within certain fields this can be very highly developed. Such concepts as an "event space" within Boolean logic describe that set of data that grouped together must be examined for the relationship termed causation. Within that event space those relationships may treated with a certain mathematical rigor. The trick is defining it in the first place. Where that is applied to a huge, practical scientific problem such as the origin of life that definition is clearly impossible. Were we to know enough to define the event space we wouldn't be asking most of the questions in the first place.
The implication is that such topics are quite beyond any sort of "proof" in the customary logical sense. Where certain small pieces may be isolated enough to define that event space they can be dealt with piecemeal, which is how science breaks this sort of thing down. One can, for example, demonstrate the passage of an electrical signal through the heart by measuring it, and note inductively that muscle contraction happens on a one-to-one correlation with it, but one has not proven the causal relationship until one can explain its mechanisms in detail. That's what event space means in this context.
The real difficulty is that although the classical (and crude) scientific model - observation, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion - lends itself to a more or less deductive treatment, it isn't actually how practical science usually works. The accretion of data that is subsumed under the term "observation," for example, is (1) a necessarily inductive process, and (2) not necessarily "observed" at all, but gathered and available for observation, data, and not information, if you prefer. Within this patterns are discerned, other observations included and compared, some discarded for either valid or invalid reasons - already we are filtering the data and the decisions made to do so are more or less arbitrary and hence subject to challenge. It isn't a clean model; it never was, and we haven't even got out of "observation" yet.
All of this is only tangentially related to that academic discipline popularly termed "postmodernism," although its predecessor "poststructuralism" is perhaps more accurate. That discipline regards the entire scientific process as a "realist epistemology," having been deconstructed (more or less) by Baudrillard, et al, and treated as just another metanarrative among several. I defer here to FReeper Borges who knows more about the topic than I do. Postmodernism considers itself transcendent to such metanarratives, or at least early postmodernism did so. (It is ironic that Marxism was specifically mentioned by Baudrillard as one such metanarrative to be discarded, in the light of the behavior of more contemporary postmodernists, who embraced it.) Whether postmodernism itself constitutes such a metanarrative to be viewed by suspicion by postmodernists is at the moment a fairly hot topic in the field.
But the test of truth within most poststructuralist/postmodernist treatments is the relationship of reader to text, observer to language and not to object, which is one reason the "all viewpoints are equally accurate" accusation hits the mark. That is not in the least a scientific point of view, which postulates the independence of observer and object.
Derrida is one postmodernist who has attempted the topic, which is essentially the relationship of text to reality. It is ironic that he did most of his work never having read Wittgenstein on it, who did it better (IMHO) and came to a quite different set of conclusions. I cite line two of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which states baldly "the world is made up not of things, but of facts." That means something very different in science than it does in, say, literary criticism, where both "thing" and "fact" are endlessly negotiable. I may be old-fashioned, but I still prefer the logical positivists to the postmodernists. So sue me.
That's as I understand the topic at the moment. I'm probably completely full of crap. I need a beer.
I have to tell you, I so totally enjoyed your post that I don’t even care that I do not agree with one thing you said. Russell, Whitehead (the total mystic) and Wittgenstein (the repressed pedophile) were perhaps the most dangerous philosophers since Hume and Kant, but you at least know when you are spouting nonsense, they never did.
Thank you so much for your intelligent and erudite, though I think mistaken, comments.
Hank
I'll join you in the beer but not the other conclusions.
RightWhale,
Like, *PING*, dude.
Cheers!