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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Boyd and Putnam argue that the predictive success of mature scientific theories is best explained by their approximate truth, making radical underdetermination epistemically self-undermining.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.History shows successful theories (Ptolemaic astronomy, phlogiston chemistry) made accurate predictions yet were fundamentally false about reality.
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    • 2.Predictive success may result from pragmatic fit to observable patterns rather than correspondence to truth about unobservable structures.
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    • 3.Boyd and Putnam assume mature science identifies which aspects of theories are truth-tracking, but theory choice criteria are themselves underdetermined by evidence.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Mature theories like Newton's mechanics and electromagnetism have made thousands of novel, precise predictions confirmed by experiment.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.If radically different theories could equally explain all evidence, convergence on specific theories across independent research programs would be miraculous.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.Approximate truth provides the only non-miraculous explanation for why false theories systematically fail to predict novel phenomena.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

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