I've taken a couple of time-stamped transcripts from this, if useful to others: “… if we are honest people and empiricists then, of course, the facts have to control the theories. That is not the way the history of science works when you take the facts singly. It’s quite clear in the history of science that the way the facts control the theories is collectively over the long haul. Not individually in the short run. It’s quite clear.” 49:56 - 50:20 “Any guidelines or rough principles, rules of thumb, what you could call friendly advice to the working scientist is only tat what his [sic] claim can be is merely statistically, this tends to pay… Scientific method dealing with the empirical world cannot be like formal logic and set theory and mathematics because it’s not deductive in that sense.” 56:35 - 57:15
the 49:56 part was eating my head for the past 3 months and i tried articulating in broken ways in my experimental psych class , finally found something, phew :D
Interesting to hear his reaction to Laudan right at the start-I’ve been reading Godfrey-Smith’s intro to philosophy of science and he argues that Lakatos and Laudan had essentially similar views. So far, Meehl hasn’t given the impression of having been rattled by Lakatos…
Great stuff. I particularly enjoyed the fragment where he affectionately refers to Feyerabend as "crazy Paul"..."the man is a little nuts" :-)
I've taken a couple of time-stamped transcripts from this, if useful to others:
“… if we are honest people and empiricists then, of course, the facts have to control the theories. That is not the way the history of science works when you take the facts singly. It’s quite clear in the history of science that the way the facts control the theories is collectively over the long haul. Not individually in the short run. It’s quite clear.” 49:56 - 50:20
“Any guidelines or rough principles, rules of thumb, what you could call friendly advice to the working scientist is only tat what his [sic] claim can be is merely statistically, this tends to pay…
Scientific method dealing with the empirical world cannot be like formal logic and set theory and mathematics because it’s not deductive in that sense.”
56:35 - 57:15
the 49:56 part was eating my head for the past 3 months and i tried articulating in broken ways in my experimental psych class , finally found something, phew :D
Interesting to hear his reaction to Laudan right at the start-I’ve been reading Godfrey-Smith’s intro to philosophy of science and he argues that Lakatos and Laudan had essentially similar views. So far, Meehl hasn’t given the impression of having been rattled by Lakatos…