What are you, an old-time logical positivist?
Of course scientists
> jump on popular
> theories. We're social animals. But that doesn't
> affect the underlying
> logical tests. Einstein said that God doesn't play
> dice and nowadays
> there's barely a physicist who would believe that -
> but there are, so
> even quantum physics is under attack from radical
> String theorists and
> such.
>
> My whole point here is that the idea that science is
> a place with more
> dogmas than the liberal arts is crazy.
Who said that? Not me.
Science is
> about confirming
> theories, but COMPETING theories. And even
> confirmations have to
> compete. And in the process of confirming, the most
> Kool-Aid-drinking
> of the scientists will over-reach, his results will
> be questioned and
> BANG! a new theory starts.
Mostly not, mostly, as Kuhn teaches, science is about solving problems within existing theories. Einstrin gor his Nobel for the photoelectric effect (problem solving), not relativity (revolutionary challenge). The Popperian theory of science as a Millean process of free inquiry, or as a Feyerabendian game in which anything goes, is too optimistic. Anyway wrong. Kuhn was write, Most science is normal problem solving within a theory.
> > That's really the point of the scientific method,
> that when results
> > are offered, they are considered observations
> which are seen to have a high
> > likelihood of confirming a hypothesis - not a
> fact, not a dogma, certainly
> > not a truth - a hypothesis.
Most sciencists rulke off the board as crackpottery ideas that offend received dogmas. You need a lot of juice (like a Nobel) to be considered to have a competing hypothesis,
>
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