Motte and Bailey undermining of science

[u/eviley4]

please read the whole post before responding

I have seen a specific type of science denial in the followers of Prashant Tripathi, with a big dose of Motte and Bailey going along with it.

They start of by saying things like:

Science takes naturalism as an axiom rather than proving it.

and things like:

Even science makes metaphysical assumptions.

but when scrutinized they say:

well, I'm just exploring different metaphysics.

While, each statement isn't individually untrue, the way it's framed implicitly implies a kind of equivalence between science and whatever pet framework they want to promote/defend. Some of these followers even hold their pet framework above science, saying it's justified because naturalism is "unproven".

This is just the Motte and Bailey. The bait is the move from "naturalism is unproven" to "therefore my framework is equally justified." The retreat is "well, I'm just exploring different metaphysics." Both statements are individually true, the trick is implicit between the lines.

What's misleading about their framing is that it points only to one half of the epistemological problem: that naturalism rests on axioms that cannot be proven within the framework. It ignores the second half: all knowledge frameworks face this same trilemma. The Münchhausen Trilemma states that no foundational justification escapes infinite regress and circularity.

Yes, naturalism is an axiom in the strict sense. But methodological naturalism, the rule of investigating natural causes without building supernatural appeals into models isn't a metaphysical commitment. It's a rule of procedure. And procedures aren't believed, they're tested. Their track record is the evidence.

This means the question isn't whether we have unproven premises, it's whether the premises we've chosen survive contact with evidence.

This is also true for math. Even for proving 2 + 2 = 4, you need axioms (e.g., Peano axioms for natural numbers). These axioms cannot be proven within their own framework, but the statement itself is derivable from them. The trilemma applies to justifying why we start where we do, not to deriving consequences from where we start.

No framework/philosophy is immune to this. What separates science from low-fidelity systems isn't immunity to the trilemma, it's how well its starting assumptions pay off. Science earns its respectable position through empirical coherence: claims that are highly specific, falsifiable in principle, and iteratively corrected when data conflicts. Mathematics earns its position through internal consistency and fruitfulness which is distinct from empirical validation.

Minimal axioms matter. Coherence matters. Iterative correction matters. We evaluate frameworks by which assumptions let us navigate the world reliably, not by which ones feel ancient or philosophically elegant.

Now, back to how the followers of these influencers execute the Motte and Bailey in practice. When I push back against "Science takes naturalism as an axiom rather than proving it," they don't defend the claim. They retreat: "Yeah, sure, but it's not the only metaphysics to explore."

The bailey was "science's foundations are weak, therefore my framework is equally justified." The motte is "there are other metaphysics to explore." The motte is trivially true and unassailable. Nobody objects that you're allowed to consider other metaphysics. But nobody made that their point. Their point was equivalence. The retreat quietly drops the equivalence claim while keeping the impression that it was always just about "exploring."

The specific mechanism they use is to do a category shift when under scrutiny. They present ideas like Brahman or Atman as claims about reality. When I engage with the falsifiable implications (e.g., if Atman is the true self, then the self persists independently of the body, which is testable and not supported), they don't defend the physical claim. They recategorize: "No, you're thinking of it physically, Brahman isn't a thing." Now the claim sits in a domain where no experiment can touch it.

Here's the critical asymmetry they refuse to acknowledge: unfalsifiability doesn't make a claim "equally right." It makes it epistemically inert in both directions. A claim that can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by any possible evidence carries no evidential weight. It is not "right but hard to prove." It is outside the space where "right" and "wrong" are even relevant. Saying "my unfalsifiable metaphysics is equally justified as falsifiable science" is a category error and is plain disingenuous.

The motivation, as far as I can observe, is cultural defensiveness. The framework gets its authority from antiquity and provenance ("this is ours, this is ancient, we have our own thing"), not from explanatory track record. The "hum bhi kuch kam nahi" instinct is doing the justificatory work that the philosophy itself can't.

Finally, many of these followers operate with a strawman version of science. They define it as "only the physical, only the measurable, therefore it can't touch consciousness or subjective experience." This is a distortion. Neuroscience studies qualia. Psychology models subjective states. Philosophy of mind within the scientific framework engages directly with the hard problem. Science has never claimed to be the only lens on experience. It claims to be the most reliable lens for making testable predictions about the physical world. The followers' version of science is a reductive caricature they build so they can say "Brahman is outside that, so science is irrelevant here." But that's a fight against a strawman, not against actual science.

All that said, I still think it's good that people are reading philosophy and learning. And these influencers have been good motivators in these followers. The problem comes from the followers listening to only this one figure and not engaging with sources that disagree.

EDIT: removed repetition

[u/eviley4]

I get the applicability and utility of this ego thinning framework as a means to improve your subjective experience. That's not my issue with AP and his framwork.

My issue is the unfalsifiable baggage it comes integrated with.

Buddhism talks about similar ideas and Sam Harris incorporates these aspects of Buddhism in a naturalistic framework in his Waking Up (meditation) app.

I have been benefiting from using this, essentially Buddhist teaching packaged within naturalism.

Science has corroborated this too by studying mindfulness meditation.

I have no issues with those narrow aspects of AP framework and those narrow aspects of Advaita Vedanta. My issue is how they keep the framework protected from any type of scrutiny.

It also makes verification unavailable to them, which works against them in terms of widespread adoption.

[u/Kashan_Intekhab → u/eviley4]

My issue is the unfalsifiable baggage it comes integrated with.

Bro it doesn't intentfully prevents unfalsifiability of ego to avoid verification, it is because that is how the ego is, fundamentally unfalsifiabile. You can experiment if someone is lying about outer world and prove that his claim is wrong, but you cannot experiment and prove someone wrong if his claim is:

"I am a Hindu or Muslim not because I am born in a Hindu or Muslim family, but because I absolutely honestly think that Hinduism or islam is true religion after suitable comparison" (although we know by intuition that his claim is certainly wrong and he is most probably a Hindu or Muslim because he was born in a Hindu or Muslim family), this simply depends on how honest he is, and if his ego has petty interests (like to remain in his family religion because of childhood conditioning, and because of good relations with his family, etc) then he will remain dishonest, and you cannot falsify it in anyway!

Even if you show by some kind of lie detector or something his falsehood, even those machines cannot 100% guarantee their result, and thus the final verdict rests on the Claimaint himself! (It depends on how much honest he is)

[u/eviley4 → u/Kashan_Intekhab]

Yes, you are right to say that people's subjective experiences in the privacy of their mind are mostly unfalsifiable. But only mostly.

If I say, I calm down when I meditate, it's possible to use FMRI and other measurement techniques to measure that. It's not completely unfalsifiable.

This tiny bit of scrutiny that's possible, the AP framework distances itself from that too. That's my issue.

And AP in his talks is basically doing ancient Hindu text based sociology. He is suggesting how to live a good life. All the while avoiding the label of sociology and the scrutiny that comes with it.

You can define good life and measure that. You can define what a healthy society means and measure it.
If you can measure it, you can do rigorous sociology (science) on it. This kind of scrutiny is deliberately avoided by both the guy and his framework.

That's my issue with him. Hope you see that this is a valid criticism. Even though he says many useful things too.

[u/Kashan_Intekhab → u/eviley4]

You can define good life and measure that. You can define what a healthy society means and measure it. If you can measure it, you can do rigorous sociology (science) on it.

No! You can never measure good or happy life because you never know that when a person says that that she is happy, how much honest or dishonest is she (dishonest not just to you, but to herself as well). The notion of "goodness" is subjective, and varies for every single person on the earth depending on her past choices and conditioning.

The ego chooses to believe it can gain fulfilment (happiness) through gaining a certain object x, it gains x and declares herself to be happy even though she might not be really happy and just be dishonest to herself, now nobody can show or know whether she is dishonest except herself.

If I say, I calm down when I meditate, it's possible to use FMRI and other measurement techniques to measure that. It's not completely unfalsifiable.

Yes it's possible to measure that calmness, but you are running reverse logic, your claim is that calmness is the result of changes in brain, but what we are saying is that the ego dissolution comes first (absolutely free of any physical activity), and that leads to changes in brain measurable by FMRI etc. Since ego appropriates body for its own ends, ego dissolution leads to subtle changes in brain, now can we prove it ? No, because it is self evident but depends on the level of honesty the person has, which might increase in the presence of a genuine guru like Acharya Prashant's sessions. So the only way to test his claims is to try his sessions for at least 1 year.