On Mar 14, 2014, at 5:29 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> It shows that "modern" cosmology has about as much relationship to physical reality as had medieval!
>
> Shane Mage
>
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God i miss Chuck Grimes!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessimistic_induction
In the philosophy of science, the pessimistic induction, also known as the pessimistic meta-induction, is an argument which seeks to rebut scientific realism, particularly the scientific realist's notion of epistemic optimism.
Scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our presently successful scientific theories are true or approximately true, where approximate truth means a theory is able to make novel predictions and that the central terms of such theories genuinely refer. The pessimistic meta-induction undermines the realist's warrant for his epistemic optimism via historical counterexample. Using meta-induction, Laudan argues that if past scientific theories which were successful were found to be false, we have no reason to believe the realist's claim that our currently successful theories are approximately true. The pessimistic meta-induction argument was first fully postulated by Laudan in 1981 and survives to this day as one of the strongest arguments against scientific realism.
{Laudan’s paper is linked. Just how many pet social theories fall as well is interminably up for grabs.}