Most of the modern science is theory-laden, which means that it is not so much inductive, but deductive:
- Induction: Observation -> Generalizations -> Paradigm
- Deduction: Theory -> Predictions -> Experiments
We form any hypotheses by deduction, and then we conduct experiments. Of course, induction is heavily used within any such theory locally but is not necessarily a way through which we would ultimately validate or create scientific models of the world. Models are a web of propositions and each of these is individually shaken or simply makes the whole theory false if falsified. If a claim is non-falsifiable in principle, it is typically pseudoscience. (There are, however, many historical exceptions.)
The problem of induction is what drove Karl Popper to consider Marxism a pseudoscience. Namely, consider dialectical materialism. A person sitting on his/her chair might read a newspaper and see the news of a union strike. But once the union strike ends, the union members have negotiated better wages. A person might conclude on each subsequent event of the world that this is dialectical materialism at work, where there are tensions and then synthesis. There is no way to falsify such material tensions. In the end, you just can't help but see those events and each subsequent event confirms your axiomatic assumptions. For Popper, this is also a strong case against verificationism.
All that aside, many scientists and mathematicians are Platonists that believe in the immaterial existence of ideas such as mathematical sets, Euclidian space, triangularity, mathematical constants (i.e. PI), physical constants (i.e. gravitational constant), or say, the principle of least action.
The big question is whether those rules, principles and constants do exist prior to first instantiating themselves in the world. If you are a nominalist then perhaps you can say that those laws don't pre-exist until first observed, but then you have to accept a type of 'hocus pocus' emergence, or Peircian evolutionary cosmology. Therefore, contrary to any such claim, physicists like George Ellis state that those entities exist in the possibility space which is itself immaterial. The claim is that those entities or laws only instantiate in the material world, but they have to already be somewhere to start with.
G. Ellis also claims that the phenomenon of consciousness, which is an entity not to be found in the natural world, is already a way to falsify reductivist naturalism (that is if you accept the premise of the hard problem of consciousness). Qualias are not to be found in the natural world and they fail logical identity to physical processes.
Another problematic assertion is the current definition of physical. In post-Newtonian physics, objects are no longer spatial, solid, and generally observable. Sometimes they only involve mathematical abstractions that lack spatiality, while other times we assume their existence due to the outcome of predictions we gather. Yet, we still operate with a dated definition of physical that was framed in the age of mechanical sciences without any leading notion of what 'physical' really means (other than simply 'described by physics').
A philosopher Jessica Wilson made recently some attempts in defining physicalism (and physical) in general, by employing a non fundamentally mental constraint (NFM) 1:
The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is
physical if and only if
(i¢) it is treated, approximately accurately,
by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of
fundamental physics at w, and
(ii) it is not fundamentally mental
(that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality)
(Jessica Wilson's paper)
At first glance, this resembles the regression to the old Galilean claim that natural sciences can only examine quantitative claims (length, mass, weight etc), but not qualitative ones (colour, joy, depth etc).
In ethics, one example is non-naturalist moral realism as espoused by G. E. Moore following his open question argument. Otherwise, naturalist, this account is founded on the supernatural account of Good.
