The Second Law is Not a Tautology (Patton-Overgaard-Barseghyan-2017)

{{Theory |Title=The Second Law is Not a Tautology |Theory Type=Descriptive |Formulation Text=The second law is not a tautology. |Topic=Tautological Status of the Second Law |Authors List=Paul Patton, Nicholas Overgaard, Hakob Barseghyan, |Formulated Year=2017 |Description=The reformulation of the second law by Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan makes it explicit that the law is not a tautology as it clearly forbids certain logically conceivable courses of events.1pp. 33-34 |Resource=Patton, Overgaard, and Barseghyan (2017) |Prehistory=The notion that satisfaction of an employed method's assessment criteria causes the acceptance of a theory has ancient roots. For Aristotle, absolute certainty and thus theory acceptance could be ascribed to propositions that satisfied certain logical and axiomatic clauses first laid out in Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics as well as the Organon.2 Following Aristotle, these ideas were perpetuated and refined by medieval thinkers like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, [[William of Ockham], Andreas Vesalius, and Giacomo Zabarella. They developed accounts of the acquisition of knowledge through observation and induction and rules for the justification and application of induction.2 Thinkers from the Scientific Revolution modified the Aristotelian-Medieval causal connection between theory assessment and theory acceptance. Isaac Newton’s method for theory assessment prescribed an inductivist acceptance criteria for theories. He proposed implicit methods for experimentation and reasoning in the Opticks as well as explicit methodological rules for philosophizing in the Principia Mathematica. His divergence from the Medievalists consisted in a prioritization of inference from observation of phenomena rather than first principles. Following Newton and like-minded inductivists such as Francis Bacon, attempts to connect methods for theory assessment and the outcomes of those assessments on theory acceptance were ahistorical and philosophically absolute in nature. These include logical construction and operationalism, hypothetico-deductivism, falsificationism, meta-methodology, and statistical methods.2 The conditionalization of theory acceptance on the outcomes of a community's employed methods took a historical turn in the 20th century. Pioneers who drew attention to the historical dimension of methods in relation to theory assessment and acceptance included like Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyeraband, Imre Lakatos, Dudley Shapere, Larry Laudan, Ernan McMullin,2 and Michel Foucault.3 |Page Status=Needs Editing }}