🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <30vca1$8g9@Jester.CC.MsState.Edu> fwp@CC.MsState.Edu writes:
>Marc A. Belanger <3914MABE@vm1.ulaval.ca> says:
>> Frank Peters <fwp@CC.MsState.Edu> wrote:

##Have you read Kuhn? In his famous book he agrues that falsifiability
##does not work as much as we think it does.
#
#No.  Does he suggest any replacement for falsifiability?  Or does he
#recommend that we just accept any theory that sounds reasonable without
#testing?

 Kuhn's book is an historical essay which doesn't presume to make
prescirptions about what should be done before theories are accepted.
It merely points out that apparently definitive experiments are often
not accepted by people working in the field, not charlatans but respected
and credentialed people who believe themselves to be, and are
scientists, and noted that in many cases the triumph of what is now
received scientific truth came over a period of generation, as diehard
adherents of an old explanation went to their graves or retirement.

The diehards always had alternative explanations for the experiments
which seemed to demonstrate that (two famous examples) phlogiston or
the ether did not exist, ingenious and seemingly 'scientific.' A new
generation of scientists heard them, and made their own decisions as
to plausibility. 

It's not that Kuhn rejects the importance of falsifiability. He only
points out that the term has, in science, a sociological meaning often
overlooked by those who see science as an inexorable-march-of-truth
process not really involving human beings and their human investments
in theories.
  Eric Mankin