"Some hold that fundamental ideas have changed so often within science—especially within physics—that we should always expect our current views to turn out to be wrong. Sometimes this argument is called the “pessimistic meta-induction.” The prefix “meta” is misleading here, because the argument is not an induction about inductions; it’s more like an induction about explanatory inferences. So let’s call it "the pessimistic induction from the history of science." The pessimists give long lists of previously posited theoretical entities like phlogiston and caloric that we now think do not exist... Optimists reply with long lists of theoretical entities that once were questionable but which we now think definitely do exist—like atoms, germs, and genes."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality (2003), Chap. 12 : Scientific Realism
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Phlogiston theory
55 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Phlogiston theory →
Related Quotes
"It likewise appears that a given quantity of Air can be united to or saturated as it were only by a certain quantity …"
"Now Mayow, like Boyle, conceived the air as made up of minute particles, while he restricted himself to two varieties…"
"If I were giving this lecture fifty years from now, the word "gravitation" would be as old-fashioned as the word "phl…"
"From inflammable air and dephlogisticated air water is produced."
"One of the most fundamental principles of Lavoisier's chemistry was the use of numbers, notably in relation to what w…"
"Intelligent design... is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a cla…"
"My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this:PROBABILITY DOES NOT …"
"Lacan goes wrong by relying (quite uncritically!) on Saussure's signifier-signified conception of language. It is und…"
"When Priestley described his discovery... he introduced... an open admission of the role of randomness in his work—ev…"
"In the course of my inquiries I was... soon satisfied that atmospherical air is not an unalterable thing; for that, a…"