“Refute” is usually not an objective thing—it’s a social thing. You can probably prove to yourself that pi=3 is false, but if you write “pi=3″ on a sheet of paper, no argument will make the ink rearrange itself to be correct.
This is one of the problems with a falsificationist idea of scientific progress, where we never prove theories true but make progress by proving them false. If evidence against a theory appears (e.g. the ability to see different stars from different parts of the earth might be thought of as “refuting” the idea of a flat earth), a proponent of that theory never has to give up on it. They can just patch the theory. Maybe light does a special little dance to make all the observations look like we’re looking out at a universe, etc. If you try to refute someone, they can just refuse to be refuted and add another patch to their theory.
After doing some reading, I feel like this guy actually does a pretty admirable job of seeing open questions and admitting ignorance. For example, he doesn’t know about the coriolis effect, so he calls it “a mysterious thing that happens to objects falling down mineshafts” and wonders whether it could cause an error in the readings of plumb bobs hanging down a mineshaft. Again, I think this is a good thing, though not as good as knowing about the coriolis effect before trying to understand the structure of the cosmos. The trouble seems mostly to be that he’s read a lot of books that are full of shit, and believes them.
This is one of the problems with a falsificationist idea of scientific progress, where we never prove theories true but make progress by proving them false. If evidence against a theory appears (e.g. the ability to see different stars from different parts of the earth might be thought of as “refuting” the idea of a flat earth), a proponent of that theory never has to give up on it. They can just patch the theory. Maybe light does a special little dance to make all the observations look like we’re looking out at a universe, etc. If you try to refute someone, they can just refuse to be refuted and add another patch to their theory.
Criticism is a much wider concept than falsification. You can criticise a theory for having too many patches to work around apparent problems.
“Refute” is usually not an objective thing—it’s a social thing. You can probably prove to yourself that pi=3 is false, but if you write “pi=3″ on a sheet of paper, no argument will make the ink rearrange itself to be correct.
This is one of the problems with a falsificationist idea of scientific progress, where we never prove theories true but make progress by proving them false. If evidence against a theory appears (e.g. the ability to see different stars from different parts of the earth might be thought of as “refuting” the idea of a flat earth), a proponent of that theory never has to give up on it. They can just patch the theory. Maybe light does a special little dance to make all the observations look like we’re looking out at a universe, etc. If you try to refute someone, they can just refuse to be refuted and add another patch to their theory.
After doing some reading, I feel like this guy actually does a pretty admirable job of seeing open questions and admitting ignorance. For example, he doesn’t know about the coriolis effect, so he calls it “a mysterious thing that happens to objects falling down mineshafts” and wonders whether it could cause an error in the readings of plumb bobs hanging down a mineshaft. Again, I think this is a good thing, though not as good as knowing about the coriolis effect before trying to understand the structure of the cosmos. The trouble seems mostly to be that he’s read a lot of books that are full of shit, and believes them.
Criticism is a much wider concept than falsification. You can criticise a theory for having too many patches to work around apparent problems.