editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
The Zeroth Law (Harder-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 18:34, 11 March 2017
, 18:34, 11 March 2017no edit summary
These criteria are employed [[method|methods]], and therefore can change over time according to [[The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)|the law of method employment]]. They dictate the standard that other theories and methods must meet so as to remain compatible with each other. The compatibility criterion of the contemporary scientific mosaic is believed to be along the lines of a non-explosive paraconsistent logic. [[CiteRef::Priest, Tanaka, and Weber (2015)]] This logic allows known contradictions, like the contradiction between signal locality in special relativity and signal non-locality in quantum mechanics to coexist without implying triviality. The compatibility criterion can be understood as a consequence of fallibilism about science. Even a community's best theories are merely truth-like, not strictly true. Our current compatibility criteria appears to be formulated as such. It is very likely that our current compatibility criteria has not always been the one employed. Discovery of the kind of compatibility criteria contained in the current and historical mosaics is an important empirical task for observational scientonomy.
|Resource=Barseghyan (2015)
|Prehistory=The idea that our beliefs should not contradict each other is one of the oldest in philosophy. It can be traced, at least, to the time of Aristotle (384-322 BCE).[[CiteRef::Carnielli and Marcos (2001)]] In classical logic, it derives from the '''principle of explosion''', which states that a contradiction entails every other sentence. Any system of beliefs that contains a contradiction, since it compels belief in anything and everything, is therefore known as a '''trivialism'''. This deceptively simple premise is implicit in most philosophies of science, and in philosophy overall. For this reason it is rarely stated outright within a philosophical or scientific framework. However, the use of contradictions to reject particular theories is important in frameworks as diverse as Isaac Newton’s Four Rules of Scientific Reasoning (non-contradiction is the fourth)[[CiteRef::Newton (1687)]][[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] and [[Karl Popper]]’s 'Logic of Scientific Discovery'.[[CiteRef::Popper (1959)]]
|History=''The zeroth law'' was introduced into the [[The Theory of Scientific Change|the theory of scientific change]] (TSC) as ''the law of consistency''. In its initial 2012 formulation the zeroth law stated that “at any moment of time, the elements of a scientific mosaic are consistent with each other”. In 2013 Rory Harder discovered that this formulation could not be correct. In his paper “Scientific Mosaics and the Law of Consistency,” [[CiteRef::Harder (2013)]] he raised two arguments against the Law of Consistency, one logical and one historical.
