Originally Posted by
Mijin
For my mind, people concede too much in this kind of discussion.
They'll say that the only axioms that science relies on are that the universe is the product of simple mathematical laws, that complex phenomena can be described in terms of these simple laws, uniformitarianism etc.
But none of these things are strictly necessary for science to be useful. Arguably they are "nice to have" -- we can form useful models and conclusions more easily in our universe than otherwise would be the case, because so far our universe has conformed to all these statements. But you can take any one of them away and still do science.
So what does science actually rely on? I think the same thing as all other reasoning; deductive and inductive logic.
Science, in the final analysis, relies on verifiable facts. Mathematics, on the other hand relies, in the final analysis, on axioms.
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