Some more thoughts on Tryptych's post:
I don't see why saying "a theory has failed x tests, so it should not be our best guess" is any different from saying a theory has passed x tests, so it should be our best guess" - i.e. they're both forms of induction.
As soon the theory fails ONE test, then it is falsified.
It may still be used for practical calculations in the absence of a better (in purely instrumentalist terms) theory but nobody believes the theory is true any longer. How can a theory about the real world be true if it is shown to be not true even once?
A falsified theory may be "our best guess" from an instrumentalist point of view but as soon as a prevailing theory is falsified, you would hope scientists would be falling over themselves to propose replacement theories and test them out.
In fact it is almost unheard of nowadays for a theory about physics to be falsified in the absence of a "challenging" rival theory. What happens is: someone comes up with a new theory which passes all the experimental tests performed on the old theory (otherwise you can discard it straight away) and then invents a new experimental test to choose between the two rivals. At this point one of the theories will be falsified and the other will become or remain the prevailing theory.
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What Wikipedia has to say about Lakatos is interesting and makes me think I may have misuderstood Popper a bit! I'll have to do some more reading. I wish my local library had any books about philosophy..... you can't buy them in the airport either :slanted:
It doesn't seem like he is supporting Kuhn but rather trying to represent Popper in a different way to how the majority had perceived/portrayed his writings in order to refute Kuhn. But let's not argue about that because I haven't read any Lakatos! I'm interested to read it but not so we can argue about who knows the most about this guy or that guy, just if it makes me understand more stuff.
As to whether Kuhn was on the right track or not, I think in some respects he was and in others we was unfair. I have never been to university or spent time among academics so I don't know the truth of what goes on, only how it is represented in the writings of scientists. So I could've been hoodwinked....
It seems to me that scientists are ready to embrace paradigm change if they are given a good reason for it - look how quantum mechanics swept through the scientific establishment and before that, special and general relativity. They were successful because they gave better explanations of observed phenomena and more accurate predictions, they were big changes to the established view but they were accepted because they came with good explanations.
I'm sure there were those who didn't go along with paradigm change (Einstein famously wasn't an easy convert to quantum mechanics, mainly due to the extremely shaky interpretations given it by its originators) but QM & relativity are both striking counterexamples to Kuhn's portrayal of the scientific establishment as set hard against change, and of new ideas basically having to wait for older established scientists to die before they could be seriously entertained.
Or am I misrepresenting/misunderstanding Kuhn here? Happy to be put straight if so...
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Non-reductive materialism (Davidson?) and other non reductive philosophies, like emergent/enactive theories that Mr. Tea makes reference too, are very much on the fringes of mainstream science
yes you're right but I feel like we've moved on to me defending what I think rather than trying to stick up for the whole scientific establishment, which I've already conceded has numerous failings when compared to the ideal.
I'm quite enjoying the debate as it goes, do stop me if I'm too self-centred.
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me - There's a key difference between "creating knowledge" and "giving you any knowledge" - science aims to find out things nobody already knew. Knowledge about literature for example is created when the literature is written, not when you learn about it. Learning about it at college or whatever is just moving knowledge from one person's brain to another's.
you - Huh? I don't understand - knowledge about science is created only on the very cutting edge of experimental science, not when you learn about it either. What's the difference? No one gets to practice "science" in college either, it's just learning about experiments and theories already created. You admit that literature can create knowledge also...
Yes you are correct in your first sentence. The difference between cutting edge science and writing literature is that science creates knowledge about the real world and that knowledge previously did not exist in any human mind. Writing literature is an act of creating something, which I will label "information" in the sense of a work of literature being a set of symbols wherein the order of the symbols matters. Something is created but it is not knowledge about the world, it is a new pattern made from the information (some of which is in the form of knowledge) already present in the brain of the author. No new truth about the world is discovered, although truth may be made more obvious or clear through literary interpretation.
This is not to belittle the creative process in anyway, it's deeply important in my opinion. But creating information/art/literature/music is clearly different to creating knowledge about the world.
Also I think you are being a little disingenuous here as you initally were saying science is not useful for "
giving you any knowledge about art/literature" which really implied something along the lines of "you can't learn about Shakespeare from doing experiments" - which is what I was replying to in the post I quoted above.
(by "the world" I mean "what there is" or "reality")
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Now we get down to it... there is no such thing as "science done right", and science is precisely the "surrounding crap" - without that surrounding crap there would be no science.
I'm not sure what axe you have to grind here. Why do you claim there is no distinction between, say, somebody trying to find out truth about some physical phenomenon, and somebody trying to find a way to show their brand of deodorant is better than brand x or trying to get a Nobel prize at the expense of their research partners? There is clearly a difference.
Like I said before, we can agree to differ in how we define our terms. If you want you can say "science" includes all the the crap, I can say it doesn't.
But I can't understand how you can say there is nothing there APART from marketing, political infighting etc. If you really think that, why are you bothering to discuss Popper with me?
I seriously want to ask, are you just arguing this for the sake of a lively discussion or do you really not see the distinction?
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The whole point of The Golem is that it is about fundamental lynchpin experiments and theories, exemplars of "proper science" and how, in fact, they are not, including Pasteur, the Michelson-Morley experiment etc. This is of course Kuhn's point too. Science at the cutting edge is determined not by appeals to "proper" objective science, but subjective factors.
Once again, I haven't read it, but once again, I have conceded many times that there are many examples of failure on the part of scientists to live up to the standards we expect of them, and I agree that they ought to be exposed.
You have to pay attention because dodgy individuals are out there, they are likely the ones in charge in a lot of cases too.
But this doesn't detract in any way from the value of pursuing knowledge in a scientific manner.
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
