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The First Law (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 20:07, 25 February 2018
, 20:07, 25 February 2018no edit summary
Formulated for [[method]]s, the first law states that the implicit expectations employed in theory assessment will continue to be employed until they are replaced by some alternate expectations.
|Resource=Barseghyan (2015)
|Prehistory=The logic behind first law of scientific change is somewhat similar comparable to that behind Newton's first law of motion. It identifies a 'null case' in which no outside forces are acting and therefore, nothing changes.
The idea that scientific changes occur only when an alternative is available was not stated in the form of a law prior to Barseghyan's ''Laws of Scientific Change''[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)]], but the idea is implicit in past concepts of scientific change. Although Karl Popper stressed the importance of empirical falsification in his view of scientific theories, he did not believe a theory with falsifying instances should be abandoned unless a better substitute was available [[CiteRef::Thornton (2016)]]. "In most cases", he wrote, "before falsifying a hypothesis we have another one up our sleeve".[[CiteRef::Popper (1959)]]