On Monday, October 29, 2018 at 5:46:13 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 10/29/2018 1:06 AM, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > On Sunday, October 28, 2018 at 7:48:57 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: >> >> >> >> On 10/28/2018 9:17 AM, Philip Thrift wrote: >> >> >> Instead of relativism, philosophers talk of *perspectivism*. >> >> (Nietzsche is said to be the father of perspectivism. I say, actually, >> Kant. ...) >> >> A Scientist sees a bunch of phenomena (recorded as data) and says, I have >> written a theory θ in a language λ that models the data!. Other Scientists >> say, I have done the same, but mine's "better"! So then there are a bunch >> of θ_λs (perspectives). The odd thing is that each Scientist talks about >> their pet θ_λ as being the world-as-it-is. >> >> >> You must be thinking of philosophers. Scientists propose an experiment >> to see which theory is better. >> >> Brent >> > > > > I don't see much evidence for that. Look at the 100s of papers on arXiv on > all the competing models for quantum gravity, dark matter, dark energy, > modified gravity, cosmic inflation, ... > > > And these papers are written mostly by *Ph.D. physicists, n*ot Ph.D. > philosophers. > > > > And some propose empirical tests. Have you seen even one philosopher > propose an empirical test? > > Brent > Phyicist: I need $200,000 for a new vacuum chamber to test my theory. > Dean: You physicists, always asking for money. Why can't you be like the > mathematicians? All they need are pencil, paper, and erasers. Or like the > philosophers. All they need is pencil and paper. > > I don't know if a philosopher has proposed a physics experiment, but I was talking about physicists who say that theories can be chosen based on factors decoupled from experiments.
*Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse* Sean M. Carroll (Submitted on 15 Jan 2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05016 *Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do cosmology without taking into account different possibilities for what the universe might be like outside our horizon. Multiverse theories are utterly conventionally scientific, even if evaluating them can be difficult in practice.* - pt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
