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Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with Thomas Kuhn? I ask because he wrote a book basically arguing that's not how science works at all.

Because the total amount of phenomenon explainable is too large for any theory, you cannot test or even hold entire concepts of "what each theory says" in your mind.

Schools of science form into communities which determine what is deemed "in scope", what are the grounding frameworks and concepts of the theories that explain the foundational phenomenon really well, informally what is out of scope, and the border territory of active research anomalies.

I only bring it up because I think it's one of the few works of genius and insight into how science and knowledge actually works in practice.

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>Because the total amount of phenomenon explainable is too large for any theory, you cannot test or even hold entire concepts of "what each theory says" in your mind.

At the far end of "models work very well and the epistemology is solid," physics solves this problem by assigning different people to each phenomenological class (organized by the engineering similarity of the experimental devices needed to probe them) and then using math to check that everyone's individual confirmation of the theory in their area fits in correctly to the bigger picture. As a result even though the frontier of physics is too large for any one person to know, the confirmation of the standard model has been built into an unbroken surface that reaches all the way from the highest energies achieved to chemistry and astronomy.

When you have a theory like that, you can prove mathematically that it is equivalent to other theories. Then, the enlightened can stop arguing about which one is "truer!" If you have two theories that only exist in the form of English sentences (this was true of psychology in Freud's era) I can't imagine what an equivalence proof would look like, even if it would be possible. Fields where you can't formalize anything tend to have philosophies that look more and more like critical theory as you move further and further from pure logic. At the far end, the empiricism is completely phenomenological and the theory is nothing but literature with no predictive power (and as a result, the only way to choose between them is by disguising aesthetic arguments as appeals to this-or-that). I can't think of any fields that didn't look like that in their infancy, and success has usually been associated with progress away from that.

> physics solves this problem by assigning different people to each phenomenological class (organized by the engineering similarity of the experimental devices needed to probe them)

That's an example of how multiple equivalent formulations of the same theory can be useful for different things even though they are ultimately equivalent.

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