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The Zeroth Law (Harder-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 18:57, 10 February 2023
, 18:57, 10 February 2023no edit summary
|Formulation File=The Zeroth Law Harder 2015.png
|Description=Harder's reformulation of the Zeroth Law states that “at any moment of time, the elements of the mosaic are compatible with each other”. ''Compatibility'' is a broader concept than strict logical ''consistency'', and is determined by the compatibility criteria of each mosaic.
We should be careful not to confuse these concepts of ''compatibility'' and ''consistency''. Barseghyan details the distinction between these two concepts:
<blockquote<"the formal definition of inconsistency is that a set is inconsistent just in case it entails some sentence and its negation, i.e. ''p'' and ''not-p''. The classical logical principle of noncontradiction stipulates that ''p'' and ''not-p'' cannot be true ... In contrast, the notion of compatibility implicit in the zeroth law is much more flexible, for its actual content depends on the criteria of compatibility employed at a given time. As a result, the actually employed criteria of compatibility can differ from mosaic to mosaic. While in some mosaics compatibility may be understood in the classical logical sense of consistency, in other mosaics it may be more flexible ... in principle, there can exist such mosaics, where two theories that are inconsistent in the classical logical sense are nevertheless mutually compatible and can be simultaneously accepted within the same mosaic. In other words, a mosaic can be ''inconsistency-intolerant'' or ''inconsistency-tolerant'' depending on the criteria of compatibility employed by the scientific community of the time"[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)||pp.154]].</blockquote>
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.