But just ruling a single thing out, when dealing with infinity, isn’t a road to progress.
We don’t deal with infinities. When asked “what sun is powered by?”, humans formulate a finite, typically small, set of hypotheses, e.g.
By nuclear fusion
By a burning woodpile
By elven magic
By something else
Ruling even a single thing out from this small set is quite useful.
If you manage to rule out everything but something else, that’s the most exciting time in science because you’re now in uncharted territory (where every true scientist wants to be) and might be on a verge of a major breakthrough.
However, if T is an explanatory theory (e.g. ‘the sun is powered by nuclear fusion’), then its negation ~T (‘the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion’) is not an explanation at all.
Ideas don’t negate to all the alternatives humans are currently interested in. That isn’t how logic works.
It is not an explanation, but it is a (potentially) useful statement which leads you closer to an explanation. And I don’t see any logical problems here (notice the something else alternative).
In any case, the underlying issue is hypothesis generation and any purely Bayesian view of science is necessarily incomplete because St.Bayes says absolutely nothing about how to generate hypotheses.
I agree that ruling statements like you talk about out is useful – I just don’t think it’s useful in the Bayesian model. The use is due to the Critical Rationalist approach.
We don’t deal with infinities. When asked “what sun is powered by?”, humans formulate a finite, typically small, set of hypotheses, e.g.
By nuclear fusion
By a burning woodpile
By elven magic
By something else
Ruling even a single thing out from this small set is quite useful.
If you manage to rule out everything but something else, that’s the most exciting time in science because you’re now in uncharted territory (where every true scientist wants to be) and might be on a verge of a major breakthrough.
DD:
Ideas don’t negate to all the alternatives humans are currently interested in. That isn’t how logic works.
It is not an explanation, but it is a (potentially) useful statement which leads you closer to an explanation. And I don’t see any logical problems here (notice the something else alternative).
In any case, the underlying issue is hypothesis generation and any purely Bayesian view of science is necessarily incomplete because St.Bayes says absolutely nothing about how to generate hypotheses.
I agree that ruling statements like you talk about out is useful – I just don’t think it’s useful in the Bayesian model. The use is due to the Critical Rationalist approach.