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The Third Law (Sebastien-2016) (view source)
Revision as of 20:00, 1 February 2017
, 20:00, 1 February 2017no edit summary
The third law has also proven useful in explicating such requirements as Confirmed Novel Predictions (CNP). According to the hypothetico-deductive method, a theory which challenges our accepted ontology must provide CNP in order to become accepted. However, the history of CNP has been a point of confusion for some time. By the Third Law, one can show that the requirement of CNP has not always been expected of new theories. When Newton published his Principia, CNP were not a requirement of his professed method, yet they were still provided. On the other hand, Clark’s law of diminishing returns had no such predictions. This is because Newton’s proposal of unobservable entities, such as gravity and absolute space, challenged the accepted ontology of the time, while Clark’s simply accounted for the data already available. Thus, in utilizing the Third Law, one can discover both when certain criteria become an implicit rule and under what conditions they are necessary.
|Resource=Sebastien (2016)
|Prehistory=The core idea of ''the third law'' can be traced back to [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Paul Feyerabend]], [[Dudley Shapere]], [[Larry Laudan]], and [[Ernan McMullin]], who suggested that our beliefs about the world shape how we engage with the world.
In his ''Science and Values'', [[Larry Laudan]] has showed how the discovery of placebo effect and experimenter's bias led to changes in drug trial methods.[[CiteRef::Laudan (1984)|pp. 38-39]] However, while Laudan’s account hints at aspects of ''the third law'', it ultimately conflates [[Method|methods]] and [[Methodology|methodologies]].[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 130-131]]
Another precursor of ''the third law'' is suggested by Ernan McMullin, who showed how the hypothetico-deductive method came to replace the Aristotelian Medieval method in the 18th century. According to McMullin, the employment of the hypothetico-deductivism was a result of accepting that the world is more complex than it appears in our observations.[[CiteRef::McMullin (1988)|pp. 32-34.]]
The idea that our theories about the world shape our methods can also be traced back to [[Thomas Kuhn]] who argued for the synchronous change of theories and methods during paradigm shifts.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1970)|p.109]]
While these accounts suggest that our accepted theories somehow impact our implicit requirements for investigating the world, they don't specify how exactly this shaping takes place. That is the gap that the third law attempts to fill.
|History=The law replaced Barseghyan's [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)|original formulation of the Third Law]]. Sebastien's third law was the first to be accepted by [[Community:Scientonomy|Scientonomy community]] via the scientonomic mechanism of [[Modification:Sciento-2016-0001|modifications]].
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