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In other words, a scientist must assume a proposed law, and test for deviations in an isolated environment. What we can glean from this description is that Herschel thinks a theory is “good” if it has new empirical content, and that if a theory has exceptions in a given domain, it is “positively untrue”, which is consistent with his view on the attainability of ultimate causes.
|Criticism=Herschel’s PD was for the most part well-received by his contemporaries, likely in part due to his high standing in the scientific and philosophical community at the time. It was praised not necessarily for its strength of argumentation (after all, Herschel was not a professional philosopher), but for its practical advice and its portrayal of the ideas of an actual practitioner of science. Darwin even cited it as a personal influence in his autobiography and referenced Herschel in the preface to his Origin. Herschel did face some criticism from William Whewell, who commented that Herschel’s departure from pure inductivism could “foster a spirit of gratuitous theorizing, which will misemploy the cultivators of science, and mislead those who learn it through words alone”.[[CiteRef::Whewell (1831)|p. 400]] However, most criticism along these lines was silenced in the early 20th century with the acceptance of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was arrived at partly through Whewell’s feared “gratuitous theorizing”. On the whole, criticism was limited due to the scientific environment at the time, in which many speculative theories were experiencing experimental success and gaining acceptance.
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