Gary R., list,
"Good" is traditionally taken as meaning "valid" or "justified" when
applied to an inference. Valid deductions can conclude in falsehoods by
vice of falsehood among the premisses, and we can see both critical and
methodeutical kinds of justification of an abductive inference that can
nevertheless turn out, upon testing, to conclude in a falsehood, e.g.,
the hypothesis of a detectable ether wind in the theoretical effort to
save the Galilean transformations; the disconfirmation of the ether wind
led eventually to the triumph of the Lorentz transformations, amid which
the Galilean transformations survive as an approximation for things
moving slowly in one's reference frame, and it led to the quantitative
unification of time and space (with lightspeed as yardstick, e.g., years
and light-years), which simply isn't there in the Galilean and
(unreconstructed) Newtonian pictures; in any case the hypothesis of an
ether wind is quite dead, but it was critically and methodeutically
justified as far as it went; it was plausible, distinctive predictions
were deducible from it, and indeed its adoption bore fruit. Researchers
need to be able to state that a hypothesis has been ruled out in plain
enough words to keep communication clear because the scientific method
is the inquiry method that, by its own account, can go wrong as well as
right. They don't always say "shown to be false," they'll say "ruled
out" or "disconfirmed" or "disfavored" or the like. The majority of
explanatory hypotheses, even the fruitful ones, turn out to be false;
the surprising thing, as Peirce often pointed out, is that they aren't
false much oftener. - Best, Ben
On 10/1/2016 11:34 AM, Gary Richmond wrote:
Ben, Jon, List,
Ben, you commented:
"An abductive inference may be good and successful in terms of the
economics of inquiry, even if it turns out to conclude in a falsehood,
if it nevertheless helps research by either making it positively
fruitful (think of all the hypotheses that positively help lead to
truth without scoring a 'hole in one') or at least by leading to
knowledge of a previously unknown dead end that would otherwise have
caused waste of time and energy."
I would tend to agree strongly with this but wonder whether
'falsehood' is the best expression to describe what happens in such a
case. The abduction is 'good' if it is testable, even if the
hypothesis is not, or not fully, borne out. As you suggested,
information is sometimes gained from testing such hypotheses which, in
the economy of research, is useful for further inquiry.
Best,
Gary R
Gary Richmond
*Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690*
On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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