🚀 go-pugleaf

The falsification of a deductive theory can be brief (not in the era
of Postscientism of course). If, for instance, a postulate, e.g.
Einstein's 1905 light postulate, is false, then REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
could quickly put an end to the respective theory:

http://www.labnews.co.uk/laboratory_article.php/4514/2/attack-on-great-pillar-of-physics

If the postulate, e.g. Clausius' 1850 postulate (Heat flows
spontaneously from hot to cold), is true, then the argument built on
it could still be invalid and the theory should be (should have been)
abandoned.

Why Clausius' 1850 argument is invalid: Clausius' claims given below
in capitals: "THE ONLY CHANGE" and "WITHOUT ANY EXPENDITURE OF FORCE
OR ANY OTHER CHANGE" - are false:

http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Clausius.html
"Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Warme" 1850 Rudolf Clausius: "Carnot
assumed, as has already been mentioned, that the equivalent of the
work done by heat is found in the mere transfer of heat from a hotter
to a colder body, while the quantity of heat remains undiminished. The
latter part of this assumption--namely, that the quantity of heat
remains undiminished--contradicts our former principle, and must
therefore be rejected... (...) It is this maximum of work which must
be compared with the heat transferred. When this is done it appears
that there is in fact ground for asserting, with Carnot, that it
depends only on the quantity of the heat transferred and on the
temperatures t and tau of the two bodies A and B, but not on the
nature of the substance by means of which the work is done. (...) If
we now suppose that there are two substances of which the one can
produce more work than the other by the transfer of a given amount of
heat, or, what comes to the same thing, needs to transfer less heat
from A to B to produce a given quantity of work, we may use these two
substances alternately by producing work with one of them in the above
process. At the end of the operations both bodies are in their
original condition; further, the work produced will have exactly
counterbalanced the work done, and therefore, by our former principle,
the quantity of heat can have neither increased nor diminished. THE
ONLY CHANGE will occur in the distribution of the heat, since more
heat will be transferred from B to A than from A to B, and so on the
whole heat will be transferred from B to A. By repeating these two
processes alternately it would be possible, WITHOUT ANY EXPENDITURE OF
FORCE OR ANY OTHER CHANGE, to transfer as much heat as we please from
a cold to a hot body, and this is not in accord with the other
relations of heat, since it always shows a tendency to equalize
temperature differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder
bodies."

In fact, the process considered by Clausius and essential for his
argument presupposes the constant action of an OPERATOR; this operator
constantly and unavoidably undergoes CHANGES, changes that are absent
when heat spontaneously "shows a tendency to equalize temperature
differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder bodies".

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

On Aug 29 Pentcho Valev 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.