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The Second Law (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 17:07, 27 January 2023
, 17:07, 27 January 2023no edit summary
Barseghyan notes an important consequence of the law:
<blockquote>So the question that the historian must ask here is: what were the expectations of the respective scientific communities that allowed for the acceptance of the respective natural philosophies? The second law suggests that, in order to reconstruct the actual method employed at a particular time, we must study the actual transitions in theories that took place at that time.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 130]]</blockquote>
A further important consequence of the law has to do with the famous, long-standing debate on the status of novel predictions. Some authors (including Popper, Lakatos, and Musgrave) argue for a special status of novel predictions, where others (like Hempel, Carnap, and Laudan) argue that novel predictions do not substantially differ from post factum explanations or "retro-dictions". But by the second law, as Barseghyan writes, "the whole debate in its current shape is ill-founded".[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 131]] Whether novel predictions have a special status, in that "a new theory is expected to have confirmed novel predictions in order to become accepted", is, by the ''second law'', dependent on a community's employed method at the time. Instead of being concerned with all theories in all contexts, we must ask whether theories in specific communities at specific time periods were required to have confirmed novel predictions.
|Resource=Barseghyan (2015)
|Prehistory=In his 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions'[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]], [[Thomas Kuhn]] supposed that theories, methods, and values formed integrated units which he called paradigms. Kuhn's holism lead him to view scientific change as a kind of gestalt shift, seemingly involving a non-rational leap of faith. Critics charged him with attributing scientific change to "mob psychology". Later, he suggested that scientists are guided by epistemic values in making such choices. He supposed these values were fixed through history [[CiteRef::Kuhn (1977a)]].
