alt Hacker News> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true
And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.
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Im not sure what your criticism is directed at.
In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.
We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.
Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.
Trying to ignore reality doesn't sound rational.