🚀 go-pugleaf

On Aug 29, 9:22 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London,
> 1981, p. 199:
> "By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of a set of
> theoretical postulates together with an appropriate set of auxiliary
> hypotheses; that is, everything that CAN BE deduced from this set."
>
> This definition is nice but "CAN BE", a typical postscientific
> distortion, spoils everything. "CAN BE" presupposes an infinite number
> of arguments and, accordingly, an infinite number of conclusions or
> assertions in the theory. So "CAN BE" vindicates established
> postscientific accounts of deductive science:
>
> W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London,
> 1981, p. 55:
> "A theory is a set of assertions and if the number of assertions in a
> theory were finite we might initially seek to explicate the notion of
> relative verisimilitude in terms of the number of truths and the
> number of falsehoods contained within the theories."
>
> That is, since, according to Newton-Smith,  the number of assertions
> in a theory is infinite, we cannot "explicate the notion of relative
> verisimilitude in terms of the number of truths and the number of
> falsehoods contained within the theories" and therefore should take
> Popper's speculations very seriously. In the absence of postscientific
> distortion Newton-Smith's definition would be slightly different:
>
> "By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of a set of
> theoretical postulates together with an appropriate set of auxiliary
> hypotheses; that is, everything that HAS BEEN deduced from this set."
>
> Then the verification of any deductive theory would be reduced to a
> small number of verifications of the truthfulness of the postulates
> and the auxiliary hypotheses, on the one hand, and a finite number of
> verifications of the validity of the arguments, on the other.
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pva...@yahoo.com

Do you sell coffee? or is that Valdez?