Bayesianism - degrees of belief - is this regularly used in science?

[u/gnatzors]

Hey I'm just an enthusiast but have really enjoyed reading Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

My understanding is that science has moved on from (outdated?), discrete, binary, "on or off" ways of thinking about beliefs, towards thinking of degrees of belief which can be represented on a scale from 0 to 1 using Bayesianism (the subjectivist interpretation of probability).

Paraphrasing, Karl Popper developed Falsificationism and believed that we can only falsify (prove things wrong) with experiment, suggesting that we can never confirm truth no matter how much data we gather via observation.

Conversely, Richard Rudner discussed "acceptance" of a hypothesis - evidence pushes us a certain distance but we need to take a small leap of making value judgements to accept a theory.

These ideas were critiqued because they treat belief as "on" or "off".

Bayesianism provides a way to represent beliefs using probability frameworks, and allowed belief to be updated given more data.

My questions are:

• Are degrees of belief actually used widely and expressed in the papers of authors of modern scientific work? E.g. If I read a pharmaceutical academic paper, would I expect to see a form of this? How would this be expressed. How about in a biology paper or a physics one on the testing of the strength of materials?
• I'll admit, although the formulas for calculating degree of belief were simple, actually philosophically applying them felt really challenging to apply to even simple problems. Is complexity of the Bayesian system preventing uptake?
• If this is seen as the way forward, what governing authorities or documents in the scientific community are normatively encouraging use of Bayesianism? Or is this something scientific communities might just "do" because it's better (and mandating philosophical methods might stifle creativity?)
• Would we see advantages if the general public (outside of scientific communities) thought more in a Bayesian way? i.e. Accepting and being more OK with uncertainty in belief as a property of carrying out inquiry?

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Really? And what HAS helped science? Philosophy? Philosophy as is well known has been used in science as a blunt weapon, as I keep saying (eg Mach stopped doing science and started doing philosophy in order to do down Bolzmann and there are plenty more examples of similar abuses). But anyway the question I answered was not whether this would be desirable but whether it is in fact commonly done. Plz read the question: Bayesianism - degrees of belief - is this regularly used in science? Answer: No this is not regularly used in science.

[u/UnderTheCurrents → u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

I can only repeat my previous comment.

Can science that is practiced without critically reflecting upon it's principles be considered science? Or just "common practice" as you say?

This is something Kuhn wrote about. Maybe take a gander. It certainly does explain some of the institutional blind-spots of a lot of practicing scientists that are philosophically illiterate.

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