I am always afraid of talking down to someone, and then when I try to simplify a concept, I get blindsided by an intelligent attack, and have to raise my game a bit, be more precise, keep to a fixed language… it is hard to modulate ideas, and I admit what I am actually trying to explain is seemingly counter-intuitive, but it is really only perceived that way because (so I believe) there are acquired habits in our use of language and of conceptualizing cognitive behavior that it is so, not because it is fundamentally complicated.
I think I can simplify the problem:
Perc, you are asking the right question: are there alternative means of verifying the ‘truth’ of a concept, and I would say yes, but I think what is implied in your question is the more direct question: are there alternative means of verifying the truth of a concept that satisfy a social verification process, something demonstrable. That is a loaded question. I would say no, but that is by no means a fault of my position but of the question. If the question was open (and maybe it was I am only guessing), then it would accept that yes, in fact on a daily basis if we are dead honest with ourselves we verify the veracity of a concept, of a position, of a strategy, not by laborious self-articulation of the factors but as if on auto-pilot, as if intuitively we knew right from wrong, the same way we intuitively know how to open a door, or walk, through acquired and/or biological experience.
Consider someone raised in the jungle without contact with other human beings: are we to suppose that due to a lack of his ability to articulate the concepts in his head to another human being he is unable to learn from the world around him, to know that water can drown him, that shelter can be made to protect him from the elements? The benefit of the demonstrable facts socially determined is just a byproduct on these basic individual skills. Thus it is not out of a singular need of a socially verified truth that truth comes into being, but we are always relying on our tacit knowledge to inform decisions individually, and only subsequently sharing this knowledge to the common good. The verification is internal and private, and reasoning, which is to say reasoning through social interaction spurned on by language sway the verification process not because of their inherent truth, but because they trigger something tacitly known. Reason sways us as concept, in the way the concept of God sways some people, not necessarily because it is essentially true but because, perhaps, there is some grain of truth in it we verify through intuition.
The delusion, I believe, given too much currency in the enlightenment period is this inversion of authority, supposing the abstract thoughts we have in which we articulate the phenomenon are in some significant way the arbiters of right and wrong, and are not actually the rough ‘abstractions’ of it, the passwords we use to channel the right answers, to codify them, to remember them. The abstractions take on talismanic importance, and especially due to the achievements of science, it is as if they have uncovered the true reality with their codifications. I would argue, what they have uncovered is what the jungle boy uncovered when he learned that water can drown him, he has learned how to use and co-exist in the living world… he has learned an instrumental tool, and that is what ‘pure’ science is, it is the further enhancement of these innate skills, it is instrumental, and by that I mean a certain procedure provides a certain predictable phenomena without required elaborations as to the why of it.
But these great leaps in scientific discovery do not come from mere observed experience, and some of it does come from a social pooling of resources, and I do not want to give the impression that I think the jungle boy is natural, it was just an example, I believe society is natural, it serves a purpose. But I do not believe we exist for society, in some perverted Hegelian sense, it is just working together, utilizing all of our capacities to discern we increase our potential to manipulate the physical world. It is not merely the number crunching of formal analysis that makes the leaps in science but imagination, this mystical power which conceives things that do not exist, draws associations between phenomena in a way that utilizes abstract thought.
And here is where I concede something to you Perc, my rhetoric has got the best of me, in that I am fighting a little too harshly against language, as if it was just dead words… it is not. It is life, it is guttural, it is the indescribable bottlenecking itself into something tangible, I believe there is some genuine worthwhile effort made in our use of language and that imagination is fueled by it to take us beyond ourselves in a way the jungle boy isolated may not be. The problem is along with all the potential good that comes from language you have people like Descartes and his mechanistic view of nature (which BTW you are treading into) which is one of those fallacies where the analogy takes on greater life, as if it was something independent, the true reality, and all science needs to shape itself around this ideology. Reality is not a machine, and that is something we can perhaps argue another day…
So to get back to your comments… it is not random guesswork, the alternative verification is relying on instinct, like I had said since the beginning, and just because we cannot encapsulate what that means, just because we do not have a single theory for what instinct is, does not mean it cannot exist, and in fact no intelligible philo-view could adequately discredit it. For that would put the cause of man’s achievements on reason or God, and neither of them can be rationally sustained. But if we just stop philosophizing and question ourselves, we would realize that there are so many things we know that we cannot prove nor demonstrate to someone else. The abilities did not NOT exist until science came around to explain it to us, it was there in a prior state.
It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it… half as much as I have 
What I am giving here, believe it or not is the very short version of all this. I realize it may still sound fantastical, but I assure you it is only because I have not had the opportunity to go into the details, to use reason to eat itself in a way that you can see for yourself how much baloney we just accept at face value. I feel like a salesman making a pitch, this is my pitch, my plea for people to truly appreciate the inversion they are participating in everyday. The same people who snicker at religious fanatics yet themselves believe in the invisible hand of economics, or biology, or cognitive science. They believe it is just that science has not caught up yet to the mechanistic model, but eventually we will have it sorted out and finally the world will be explained away; I assure you it is a prison of our own making, as fanatic as a jihad, and all because the concepts sway belief and a fog of conventional wisdom pervades the attention-deficit multitudes.
I know this sounds slightly unibomberish.
In essence this is something I need a whole night in conversation to explain, preferably around a bonfire. This medium is failing me.
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The fog of language and the conventional wisdom that is built out of it obscure our ability to discern right from wrong in the way one can innately discern right from wrong from direct empirical observation. The belief structures of these ideologies, i.e. nature is a mechanism, pervade the social conscious with such vehemence that it is very much like a thick fog draped over our innate abilities. The conceit of formal analysis gains its authority by the unfortunate foundational ideologies of the sciences, supposing a refined hierarchal value in keeping not merely with social conscious but with our own innate abilities, thus spurning on the great inversion of authority. It is my view that the inherent value in formal analysis is derived from these innate abilities, abilities which transcend rational articulation. Fallaciously, we project on an external thing the value we impart on it ourselves, much the way, to give an analogy, Michelangelo famously exclaimed that the sculpture was already there in the marble block before he approached it. The difference being only for us it is not the marble block bearing the fruits of our labor but a technique of analysis and the signifiers of meaning we employ.
The proof is in the easy dismantling of any formal analysis by its own reliance on reason, its own need to be coherent by the laws of bivalence and non-contradiction, and soon the arbitrariness of the analysis reveals itself. It is not autonomous. It requires our faith to be made sound. Ideally, one could say the fruits of social industry are supported and indeed indicative of the pooling of our innate abilities to discern, were it not that we are susceptible to deceit by some of the ideologies we are capable of inventing. Marx talked about a false consciousness, and I am afraid I am going to have to agree with that idea, at least nominally, it is this false consciousness devised by the fog of language that inhibits us as a society from our potential, making us go down the mechanistic route of our invention. The Egyptians let their imagination run wild and they created the pyramids and believed in scarabs in the sky, we believe in the mechanistic world and put our industry firmly fixed in that misconception. The ideology of the Neo-Conservatives, I assure you is firmly fixed in a formal analysis, an analysis of what is good governance. If there is such thing as a good formal analysis it is one that is used conscious of its limits, as one would play a game.
I am still confused. but will look at it again weekend.
Perhaps the best way for me to explain would be to take a challenge. Provide for me a specific article of sound knowledge, something we would likely use in everyday conversation yet which we suppose has proof(s) firmly fixed in the hard sciences.
A stock example I am already equipped for is that we use induction to anticipate future events. This is a fallacy.
But I am interested in new examples.
Paul Feyerabend is one of the philosophers of science that I adhere to, and this excerpt from wikipedia best elucidates his view, and indeed my view on science:
“Feyerabend described science as being essentially anarchistic, being obsessed with its own mythology, and making claims to truth well beyond its actual capacity. He was especially indignant about the condescending attitudes of many scientists towards alternative traditions. For example, he thought that negative opinions about astrology and the effectivity of rain dances were not justified by scientific research, and dismissed the predominantly negative attitudes of scientists towards such phenomena as elitist or racist. In his opinion, science has become a repressing ideology, even though it arguably started as a liberating movement. Feyerabend thought that a pluralistic society should be protected from being influenced too much by science, just as it is protected from other ideologies.
Starting from the assumption that an a historical universal scientific method does not exist, Feyerabend argued that science does not deserve its privileged status in western society. Since scientific points of view do not arise from using a universal method which guarantees high quality conclusions, he thought that there is no justification for valuing scientific claims over claims by other ideologies like religions. Feyerabend also argued that scientific accomplishments such as the moon landings are no compelling reason to give science a special status. In his opinion, it is not fair to use scientific assumptions about which problems are worth solving in order to judge the merit of other ideologies. Additionally, success by scientists has traditionally involved non-scientific elements, such as inspiration from mythical or religious sources.”