Quote:
Originally Posted by korjik
To say that "Newton's law of gravitation has been falsified." Not very useful at all.
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In principle I agree with that, but it wasn't the original setting that there was centuries old theory which pretty much everyone knows has been falsified ages ago. It was about current theory that is generally considered as not yet falsified.
To say that "Y is falsified by set of observations X" in my opinion is very useful when Y is generally considered as not yet falsified. However,
Nereid's attitude in this matter seems to be something like we should only talk about observation set X as a problem for Y if we already know how to fix Y so that X is not a problem for it anymore. That's somewhat similar to the situation where I would take my bicycle to repair shop but I wouldn't be allowed to tell them what's the problem if I myself wouldn't know how to fix it.
I'm not much of a fan of this current trend of going from "truth" to "truth", i.e. we consider one theory to be "truth" and we only abandon that theory if we have another theory which we can start considering as "truth". I would be quite happy to be officially in "we don't know" state, and just look for more observations to quide us, and perhaps do some low level hypothesizing.