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The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 20:30, 3 February 2023
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The third law does not stipulate how methods should go about specifying any new abstract requirement. The third law functions as a descriptive account of how methods change, and is not responsible for describing how methods ought to change. As such, it is an effective means of explicating the requirements of other employed methods.
The third law has an important corollary: scientific change is not necessarily a ''synchronous '' process. See [[Scientific , which is a key contradiction with Kuhn's view of scientific change is not necessarily as a ''wholesale,'' ''synchronous '' process.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 151]]An example is provided below.
|Resource=Barseghyan (2015)
|Prehistory=The basic idea of ''the third law'' is not new. A number of philosophers have suggested that our beliefs about the world shape how we engage with the world. Different versions of this idea can be found in the works of [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Paul Feyerabend]], [[Dudley Shapere]], [[Larry Laudan]], and [[Ernan McMullin]].
<blockquote>Suppose a new theory becomes accepted and some new abstract constraints become imposed. In this case, we can say that the acceptance of a theory resulted in the employment of a new method and the employment of a new method was synchronous with the acceptance of a new theory. But we also know that there is the second scenario of method employment, where a method implements some abstract requirements of other employed methods. In this scenario, there is a certain creative gap between abstract requirements that follow directly from accepted theories and methods that implement these abstract requirements. Devising a new method that would implement abstract requirements takes a fair amount of ingenuity and, therefore, there are no guarantees that these abstract requirements will be immediately followed by a new concrete method. In short, changes in methods are not necessarily simultaneous with changes in theories.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 150-151]]</blockquote>
Barseghyan also presents a historical example showing that scientific change is not necessarily a ''synchronous'' process. <blockquote> When it comes to acquiring data about such minute objects as molecules or living cells, the unaided human eye is virtually useless. This proposition yields, among other things, an abstract requirement that, when counting the number of cells, the resulting value is acceptable only if it is obtained with an “aided” eye. This abstract requirement has been implemented in a variety of different ways. First, there is the counting chamber method where the cells are placed in a counting chamber – a microscope slide with a special sink – and the number of cells is counted manually under a microscope. There is also the plating method where the cells are distributed on a plate with a growth medium and each cell gives rise to a single colony. The number of cells is then deduced from the number of colonies. In addition, there is the flow cytometry method where the cells are hit by a laser beam one by one and the number of cells is counted by means of detecting the light reflected by the cells. Finally, there is the spectrophotometry method where the number of cells is obtained by means of measuring the turbidity in a spectrophotometer.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 151-152]]</blockquote> These are three different implementations of the ''same'' abstract requirement, which were, importantly, all devised and employed at different times.|Example Type=HypotheticalHybrid
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