>That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.

I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.

>We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.

Again, this seems completely irrelevant to the statement you've quoted. You're confusing a knowledge of how a method works with a knowledge of how chemical reactions work. The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time. You seem to be saying that deciding between theories by a coin toss would be scientific if it turned out to be effective (which it might, in principle). But surely effectiveness is not the only criterion we apply. We also require the methods used to be in some sense rational, although (as you would discover if you bothered to read the philosophy of science instead of sneering at it), it is very difficult to figure out exactly what this means.

>They are statements about what people think people should do.

I don't agree, I think they are simply statements about what people should do. Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct. (One can imagine a scenario in which everyone has brains which cause them to think that squares are circles, but that wouldn't imply that facts about geometry are merely facts about a consensus of human thought.) I'm not sure what you mean when you say "this is also empirically true." Are you suggesting that it has somehow been /empirically/ established that moral statements are statements about what people think people should do? I don't see which empirical facts about the brain could adjudicate between different positions regarding the nature of moral statements. I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts. There is no reason whatever to think that this is the case (and though you persistently assert that is is, you never bother to provide any), but this idea really seems to have captured your imagination.