editor
245
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Mechanism of Theory Rejection (view source)
Revision as of 03:48, 14 March 2018
, 03:48, 14 March 2018no edit summary
|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,
|Formulated Year=2015
|Prehistory=The question about the rejection of theories has been an important one throughout the history of science. Many philosophers of science have attempted to provide an answer for to the question of how scientific theories get rejected. Both rationalists and empiricists thought that theories can be rejected or disproved in an incontrovertible manner. Believing that there is an absolute method of science, they believed that theories are assessed by this method, and if they fail to satisfy the method’s requirements, they are conclusively rejected.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1970a)]] [[Immanuel Kant]] echoed their beliefs. He held that scientific theories (especially Newtonian mechanics) are synthetic a priori. As their knowledge is gained independently of experience but is nevertheless synthetic, theories can never be rejected as no empirical evidence can contradict them.[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)]]
The rejection of Newtonian theory by Einstein’s general relativity in 1919 led philosophers of science to reevaluate their notions of the status of scientific theories. The position of infallibilism of the earlier philosophers was replaced with fallibilism during the early 20th century. For example, logical positivists (or empiricists) of the '''Vienna Circle''' advanced a probabilistic understanding of theories based on inductive logic. [[CiteRef::Godfrey-Smith (2003)]] They argued that we cannot absolutely know whether a theory is true or false. Rather, they thought that empirical evidence is used as confirming or dis-confirming evidence for theories. A theory was thought to get rejected when it was confronted with a sufficiently great number of disconfirming instances, leading to a detrimental reduction in its probability.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1968a)]]
