[lbo-talk] URPE Summer Conference -- Aug 15-18 -- REGISTER NOW! ORGANIZE A PANEL!

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sat Jul 12 08:01:34 PDT 2008


On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:40:15 -0800 Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> writes:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 11, 2008, at 8:55 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> >
> >> And many philosophers of science would agree with
> >> Laibman on that point.
> >
> >
> > I'm not sure economics is a science, but that might be a quibble.
> >
> > Why do you have to prove a successor truth when you think
> something is
> > untrue?
>
> You don't. The argument is incoherent. If a theory is consistently
>
> contradicted by data, it's not a good scientific theory.

In practice most theories are contradicted by at least some of the data that's out there. Defenders of a given scientific theory will then invoke ad hoc hyotheses to explain, or in some cases to explain away, the contradictions between the theory and the data. There are no hard and fast rules for determining when a theory can be said to be "consistently contradicted by data," just as there are no hard and fast rules for determining whether a theory is a "good scientific theory."


> Whether or
> not
> there are other theories that explain the contradictory data is
> irrelevant.

Actually, it is quite relevant to the decisions made by scientists as to whether or not to adhere to a given theory. Writers like Philipp Frank, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, have all pointed out that very often scientists will stick to a theory, even if it has been extensively contradicted by data, in lieu of there being another alternative theory to which they can switch their allegience to. Kuhn provided some examples of this in his *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*.


>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
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>
>

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