Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, editor, Interface administrators, Administrators (Semantic MediaWiki), Curators (Semantic MediaWiki), Suppressors, Administrators, Widget editors
11,019
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
Conclusive Theory Assessment (view source)
Revision as of 01:09, 10 September 2018
, 01:09, 10 September 2018no edit summary
{{Topic
|Question=Are there really any actual historical instances of ''conclusive'' theory assessment or does every case of theory assessment involve some degree of ''inconclusiveness''?
|Topic Type=Descriptive
|Description=[[The Second Law|The second law]] specifies that, in order to become accepted, a theory is assessed by the method employed at the time.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 129-132]] Barseghyan envisioned three possible distinct outcomes for theory assessment: accept, not accept, and inconclusive.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 199]] Are there really cases where the assessment of a theory is ''conclusive'', or is there always some degree of ''inconclusiveness'' involved? If there are necessary cases, is it possible for us as historians to show decisively that a theory assessment had a conclusive outcome, e.g. to show that it was accepted after having conclusively satisfied the requirements of the employed method rather than accepted after an assessment that involved some degree of inconclusiveness? We can ask the same question with regard to mosaic splits: are [[Necessary Mosaic Split theorem (Barseghyan-2015)|necessary splits]] actually possible, or are all mosaic splits the result of inconclusive assessment? And if they are possible, can we ever as historians detect them?
