Beg to disagree self styled and self reverential Sciencemeisters like the Edge organisation have toyed with the idea of changing science notably in ways that would benefit their ontological beliefs.
Sean Carroll proposed the retirement of falsifiability from science and Dawkins, the retirement of essentialism.
Edge describes itself as made up of the ''most complex and sophisticated minds'' and the prescriptive title of it's latest pronouncement ''What to think of machines that think'' for lesser minds says it all.......
...........I'm thinking inspiration for future Bond villains here.
Load of rubbish.
Science is objective and the methodology is developed to specifically identify hypotheses and theories that aren't supported. Hence the need for reproducibility and the notion that in science theories are continually tested and retested and only remain valid while they stand up to that testing.
I am a professional scientist and until now I have never heard of the Edge organisation and looking at their web-site I am struggling to understand what on earth their relevance to the notion of scientific principles of investigation is.
As for Sean Carrol - sure anyone can propose anything, but that doesn't mean that scientific principles somehow must change at their beck and call - indeed not.
Science isn't affected by either the views of Sean Carrol or a web-site from some obscure foundation - science will continue to use its robust, tried and test, objective and rational approaches to uncover more about the universe and the world around us.
And I think you are failing to understand the difference between hard core science and the popular communication of that science to a wider public.
