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From: John Jones on 26 Mar 2010 18:37
John Jones wrote:
> Pentcho Valev wrote:
>> W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London,
>> 1981, p. 14:
>> "...all physical theories in the past have had their heyday and have
>> eventually been rejected as false. Indeed, there is inductive support
>> for a pessimistic induction: any theory will be discovered to be false
>> within, say 200 years of being propounded. (...) Indeed the evidence
>> might even be held to support the conclusion that no theory that will
>> ever be discovered by the human race is strictly speaking true. (...)
>> The rationalist (who is a realist) is likely to respond by positing an
>> interim goal for the scientific enterprise. This is the goal of
>> getting nearer the truth. In this case the inductive argument outlined
>> above is accepted but its sting is removed. For accepting that
>> argument is compatible with maintaining that CURRENT THEORIES, while
>> strictly speaking false, ARE GETTING NEARER THE TRUTH."
>>
>> The pessimistic induction separately introduced by Putnam and Laudan
>> is popular among philosophers of science but it is incompatible with
>> deductivism. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:
>>
>> http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is
>> always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
>> independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."
>>
>> By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that
>> is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence
>> of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is
>> true, then all its consequences are true, and IN THIS SENSE the theory
>> is absolutely true.
>>
>> If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the
>> equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true.
>> This can easily be seen on close inspection of the Michelson-Morley
>> experiment:
>>
>> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
>> John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
>> evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
>> universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
>> relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
>> WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
>> POSTULATE."
>>
>> http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
>> "Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
>> p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
>> suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
>> the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
>> train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
>> speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
>> emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
>> that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
>> Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
>> result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
>> contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
>> we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
>> result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
>> ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
>> or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."
>>
>> Therefore the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
>> antithesis, c'=c+v, deduced validly and in the absence of false or
>> absurd auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all
>> its conclusions are true.
>>
>> Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the pessimistic induction is
>> unjustified. The transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics
>> was either a transition from absolutely false to absolutely true or a
>> transition from absolutely true to absolutely false.
>>
>> Pentcho Valev
>> pvalev(a)yahoo.com
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