GLY-1102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Atomic Number, Falsifiability
17 Sep 2018
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Document Summary
Principle of falsifiability- theories cannot be proven true, only proven false. Aesthetic credo: beauty in the eye of beholder. Political laws: can be morally, religiously, sci wrong, but no pol wrong. Prevailing paradigm: model or theory that is static for a time. Paradigm is often so convincing in a discipline, renders possibility of any alternative impossible or unconvincing, opaque paradigm. Obscures possibility that there might be other explanations. Conviction that current paradigm is realitytends to disqualify evidence that might undermine the paradigm itself, build of anomalies. Paradigms are drama in stable and mature ideals. The simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. Experimenter of expectancy (conformational bias)-your data always manages to support your hypothesis. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc- something happened after another event, the prior caused the former. Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc- simultaneous events, one causes the other. Correlation v. causation- things may be related, but relation only implies causation.
