Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>
> Miles tells us:
>
> ". . . If a theory is refuted time and again by evidence, it
> should be discarded. It doesn't matter how many theories there are to
> replace it. A good scientific theory is consistent with the available
> evidence. If there is no well-supported theory in a particular field of
> study at a particular time, that's not the end of the world; it just
> means we have some creative theorizing to do."
>
> Well that the ideal certainly but the actual practices
> of scientists are a good deal less tidy.
I lost the anthology that contains this essay, and I can rememer neither the author nor thetitle of the book it originally appeared in. I gathered from it at the time that the author was a retired biologists of some distinction who was writing some sort of history. The hcapter dealt with the uselessness of a pile of facts as such to constitute science. Relevant here is a particualr event in his own career. He submitted an article to a journal reporting on some exprimentation he had carried out which was incompatible with current thoery in that particular area. The editor rejected it. Some years later it was demonstrated that that particular theory was wrong and his research correct.
BUT, he goes on, the editor was wholly correct to reject my article. In the state of knowledge at the time no one could have made any use of my results, and in fact tryign to work with them would merely have delayed longer the time it took to disprove one theory and provide a theoretical place for his discoveries. Facts can be useless without a theoretical context to give them meaning. That is one of the reasons two equally intelligent and knowledgeable persons, looking at an identical set of facts, can come to utterly inconsistent explanations of what those facts mean. Facts wholly fail to explain themselves -- are in fact meaningless in themselves.
Carrol
>
> It is interesting to note that when Einstein
> developed his theory of special relativity,
> he did so in contradiction to a lot
> of empirical data. His theory's prediction
> of the mass of an electron when accelerated
> close to the speed of light was contradicted
> by the available experimental evidence,
> which Einstein readily dismissed. Later
> experiments would vindicate Einstein on
> that point.
>
> Jim F.
>
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----
> > From: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> >
> >
> > A statement, which as far as these things go,
> > is pretty much a common place in the philosophy
> > of science. There are certainly plenty of
> > examples in the history of science of
> > theories continuing to be widely accepted
> > by scientists despite their inconsistencies
> > with empirical data because at the time
> > there were no good alternative theories
> > to replace them. So I think Laibman
> > does have a point here,
> >
> > Jim F.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
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> >
> >
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