I agree with most of what you say, and I think you say it well. One minor instance of my own skepticism concerns your statement above. I’m an amateur too. I invented/discovered my “Metatheory of Sailing”, which has been checked by a physicist for accuracy. Basically, it shows that there are 4 fundamental ways in which sailing craft may function to propel themselves, and sailing can occur in 12 material media context, one of which is wind over water. I’m writing a book about my Metatheory.

In the process of devising my theory, I had to fit all of the thousands of facts into a consistent pattern. I realized that the distinction between discovering and inventing a theory doesn’t hold up. The process of discovering a consistent pattern is highly inventive. I’m an amateur inventor so I’m familiar with the process of invention. Many of my inventions are based on discovering new mechanical principles by trying a lot of things to see what happens.

So my opinion is that scientific theories, such as those of Newton and Einstein, are most definitely invented. But when they are well invented, they describe reality so closely that the theories seem to be discoveries of truths that were already there. We accept those truths as if they were Platonic ideals that had always existed somewhere out there. But that, I believe, is supernatural thinking.
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ON DENIERS

A subject related to the debate over global warming is the sailing debate over sailing directly downwind faster than the wind (DDWFTTW). There are, remarkably, DDWFTTW deniers. Their thinking processes seem quite similar to those of global warming deniers. They include even engineers. The reason seems to be that sailing DDWFTTW challenges (flawed) basic physical assumptions about the nature of physical reality held by those engineers. They seem to not understand that all inertial frames are equivalent, and they apply F = MA in a naive and oversimplified way. They deny that sailing DDWFTTW is possible because if it were, then they would need to acknowledge that their understanding of basic physics had been incorrect, and that is too disconcerting (cognitive dissonance)for some people.

My academic training was as a school psychologist, so I’m interested in understanding the patterns of thought that underly the thinking of deniers.

Thanks for your attention to my comments.

Peter