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The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 14:16, 18 August 2016
, 14:16, 18 August 2016no edit summary
In Barseghyan’s explication of the Aristotelian-Medieval method, he illustrates how Aristotelian natural philosophy impacted the method of the time. Most notable is the acceptance of teleology – a theory which states that every thing has a nature it seeks to fulfill (e.g. an acorn’s nature is to become an oak tree). It stood to reason that the nature of a thing can only be intuitively grasped by an experienced person. This fundamental belief generated a method which specifies these requirements known as the Aristotelian-Medieval method, and is an illustration of how employed methods are deductive consequences of the accepted theories of the time.
The third law has also proven useful in explicating such requirements as Confirmed Novel Predictions (CNP). According to the Hypotheticohypothetico-Deductive 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=Barseghyan (2015)
|Formulation File=The Third Law Barseghyan 2015.png
Ernan McMullin’s accounts of historical methods offer another example of a prototype of ''the third law''. McMullin showed how the implicit method used by Galileo was at odds with the method he professed to use and that which was actually employed at the time.[[CiteRef::Allen (1988)]]
Furthermore, McMullin showed how the Hypothetichypothetico-Deductive deductive method came to replace the Aristotelian Medieval method in the 18th century. In his account, McMullin shows that 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.]] These accounts demonstrate how our accepted theories impact our implicit requirements for investigating the world.
There have been many other attempts at explicating the way in which methods change, such as the reconstructions of Plato’s method performed by David Lindberg, or the proposal of synchronous change in paradigm shifts by Thomas Kuhn.
|History=This was the first attempt to address the problem of method employment in the scientonomic context.
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