Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Chaos and Computation
Message-ID: <D9I8st.5rF@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <3okkj7$s7d@cc.joensuu.fi> <3ptlio$r3m@mp.cs.niu.edu> <801269896snz@longley.demon.co.uk> <D9EyJw.I9C@spss.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 17:34:05 GMT
Lines: 30

In article <D9EyJw.I9C@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>In article <801269896snz@longley.demon.co.uk>,
>David Longley  <David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>As I see it, Popper basically made the point that the information content of 
>>a hypothesis increases as it inceases in the number of conjunctive clauses, 
>>and that falsification of any one of those clauses falsifies the lot. 
>>
>>Furthermore, as the conjunctives grow, ie become more specific, e.g, 'it will 
>>rain on sunday, and at 3pm, and for 5 minutes', they becomes less likely. 
>
>And at the same time it becomes more uncertain what a falsification falsifies.
>
>>But is philosophy of science normative or descriptive?
>
>Shouldn't philosophy of science find out what science does first before
>telling it what it *should* do?  
>
>Feyerabend makes a good case, I think, that if Galileo's peers had applied
>strict Popperian rules, they would have had to reject the heliocentric
>theory, which was falsified by the best evidence of the time.

Was it really falsified or just no better at explaining this evidence than
the Ptolemy theory?

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
