The Human Question

Still working through my notes on Dembski... and after that I have plenty to say about the end of Shermer's Why Darwin Matters . But this claim by BD is interesting: his professed approach to science is that of a constructive empiricist.  That is, he looks at a scientific hypothesis as a source of fruitful prediction more than as an accurate representation.

To say that a car is presently going 60mph is usually to say a counterfactual: one who says this means that if it did travel for an hour (even though it hasn't yet done so), then it would have traversed 60 miles. And this counterfactual goes beyond what has been experienced. For the measured speed in question is really the disposition to go 60 miles in an hour. But a disposition as such is beyond the reach of an empiricist. We simply don't sense "60mph": rather, we interpret something as having a disposition to traverse a certain distance. This interpretation, in going beyond experience, is just as metaphysical as causality, for like causality, disposition goes beyond experience in interpreting it.