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Re: [APD] Science



you sir have a gift for wording i do not possess.
thats about all i was trying to really say

David Aiken wrote:

>On 03/11/2005, at 11:53 AM, Jerry Baker wrote - cutting everything  
>except the one statement I want to comment on:
>
>  
>
>>I say if you have two people, one who accepts laws that have  
>>already been established and proven, and the other who does not,  
>>then the former is possessed of more knowledge than the latter.  
>>That's not an insult, just a fact.
>>    
>>
>
>The 'laws' of physics are always subject to revision and they  have  
>been known to be revised on occasion. The fact that something  
>disagrees with what is currently accepted does not make it  
>automatically wrong. The onus is on the claimant to prove their  
>claim, and there's a fairly steep uphill slope for them to push  
>things up in order to do that, but it does happen on occasion. You  
>can't prove that a claim is wrong simply by saying that it violates  
>what is currently accepted, but you can say that it is extremely  
>unlikely that they are right.
>
>So the person who accepts "laws that have already been established  
>and proven" may not always be in possession of more knowledge than  
>the person who doesn't in relation to an issue at question. It's  
>quite possible, even probable, that they are, but sometimes people do  
>come up with new things that fly in the face of what is accepted, and  
>which revise or replace what has previously been accepted. If the  
>person who does not accept the currently accepted view in your  
>comparison just happens to be the person who really does come up with  
>something new that replaces something currently accepted with a new  
>view of things, then one could quite rightly say that they do know  
>more than the person who accepts laws that have already been  
>established and proven.
>
>Scientific knowledge doesn't only grow by a simple accretion of new  
>'facts' and 'laws' that simply get added to whatever 'facts' and  
>'laws' have already been accepted. Revision occurs also and sometimes  
>what has previously been accepted gets thrown out or modified. We're  
>never in a position to claim that any particular 'fact' or 'law' is  
>the final and complete statement of knowledge on something, simply  
>because we don't know what new discoveries will be found in the future.
>
>I'm not taking sides in the debate between you and Tom on the  
>behaviour of CO2 in the aquarium - I don't  know enough to argue the  
>points one way or another. I'm simply taking exception to one of your  
>claims which puts currently accepted scientific knowledge on an  
>unassailable pedestal. Scientific knowledge is never unassailable in  
>principle so it can never be placed on that particular pedestal. It's  
>always extremely hard to prove something which revises what is  
>currently accepted but it isn't impossible and scientists who say  
>that something can't be true because it disagrees with current  
>knowledge have been known to end up with  egg on their face and the  
>discovery that they didn't know quite as much as they thought.
>
>If Tom is making a claim that disagrees with what is currently  
>accepted, then the onus is rightly on him to prove it, but you can't  
>'disprove' his proof simply by saying that it disagrees with what is  
>accepted. You have to show that there is a mistake somewhere in the  
>observations and/or deductions he made. The way that tends to be done  
>is by attempting to replicate his study and coming up with different  
>results. It's definitely not an armchair exercise. You can't prove a  
>claim wrong by saying that it has to be wrong since it disagrees with  
>something currently believed unless you're in a position to prove  
>that nothing currently believed is wrong and about the only entity  
>most people grant that level of omniscience to is god. Unfortunately  
>god usually tends to be unavailable as a witness on matters of  
>scientific dispute or we'd all know a lot more than we do.
>
>David Aiken
>
>
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>  
>
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