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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The law of free fall cannot be refuted by experiment alone because it functions as a definition of 'free fall'.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Quine's holism shows that no statement functions as a pure definition immune to revision; all statements face the tribunal of experience collectively.
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    • 2.If 'free fall' is redefined whenever anomalies arise, this constitutes an ad hoc maneuver that Lakatos would identify as degenerative within a research program.
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    • 3.The empirical success of Newtonian mechanics in predicting trajectories demonstrates that free-fall laws carry genuine predictive content beyond mere stipulation.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Poincaré's own conventionalism acknowledged that conventions are chosen for empirical convenience, making systematic predictive failure a legitimate ground for revision.
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    • 2.If the law of free fall were purely definitional, it could not explain why bodies deviate from predicted paths near massive rotating objects, yet general relativity does explain this.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The law of free fall defines what 'free fall' means rather than making an empirical claim subject to test.
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    • 2.Definitions are not empirically falsifiable.
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