Antiplastic

So all the books and papers and conferences defending and attacking and deriding and developing string theory which call it "string theory" take place outdoors! Of course!

The Dagda

Yep, can't change science by wishing it so or using false names or pretending your propaganda passes muster, or appealing to minorities or the lay community. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or a hypothesis by any other name is still a hypothesis. I can call my cat a dog if I like, and to all intents and purposes it would be a cat.

Most people say that tomatoes are vegetables, according to the lay community they are, but those who know better would beg to difffer.

Let me put it this way, a year or so ago the scientific community got together to decide if Pluto should be a planet. There was a vote and it was decided it wasn't a planet and it was reclassified. Now who do you think should have the right to define what makes a planet and what doesn't: the lay community, which undoubtedly in the majority still think Pluto is a planet. The small minority who think it's a planet within the scientific community or the large majority who think it isn't?

Antiplastic

Your example makes my point for me.

At no point in time did "the entire scientific community" get together and "vote" that the RNA World Hypothesis was "not hypothesis, but theory", or vice versa, because 1) there is no governing body of "the scientific community" that could make a binding declaration of the sort, and 2) (most importantly!) ideas in science have been called the Blah Blah Theory or the Finklewinklestein Hypothesis because of essentially arbitrary historical contingencies that don't even deserve to be called reasons, because the definitions of those terms are irrelevant; so even if some body did make such a declaration, it would be by fiat and would fail to track actual use.

Nowhere in science are these distinctions formally operationalized. And they don't need to be.

Quinn

That's not exactly what I meant by "arbitrary".

Take, for example, a photon. We know photons exist. We have an abundance of very good evidence that photons exist. But the mere knowledge that photons exist doesn't make the photon itself seem any less arbitrary to me.

Does anyone know of some reason why photons must exist, and why they must have the particular set of properties that describe a photon? I know many scientists would say the question I just asked is meaningless, because there is no "why" to fundamental reality. Fundamental reality simply is what it is. In other words, fundamental reality is...arbitrary.

I know photons exist. I still think the photon is a completely arbitrary little gadget. If we were Greeks living 3000 years ago, and someone hypothesized the existence of the photon, giving all the correct properties of the photon, we would consider the hypothesis completely arbitrary. We would ask why those particular properties? Why that particular speed? What the hell is "up spin" and "down spin"? The brilliant photon-theorist would enlighten us: "Because it works."

So? How many other equally ingenious hypotheses would "work" equally well? In this particular case, it would just so happen that this particular hypothesis just happens to be correct. We now know that photons do exist, and we know what their properties are.

And I still say the photon is a completely arbitrary little piece of gadgetry.

The Dagda

Except they are and string theory is not a theory, in fact scientists have to learn early on what to do to get themselves a theory. You still are guilty of trying to make string theory a theory by force of will, I think the consensus matters and in this case it is not, its that simple.

And the requirement that a theory must be testable is formally recognized anyway so widely recognized that no one actually needs to assert it, so I don't take your assertion that a scientific theory needs nothing at all seriously, thankfully I am not the only one. The day the science community abandons scientific method for chasing moonbeams and dreams and calling it theory or science is the day I will agree.

And like I said before history means nothing when the history your talking about was disposed of in an era post scientific method. You want to hark back to the days when philosophy was science, good for you, drag science back to the dark ages if you want, but I doubt anyone's going to be convinced by arguments that as scientists we should take a step backwards and let all the rich tapestry of imagination in the science door.

Why are you so keen to turn science back into philosophy anyway, seriously? Surely the philosophers will object? I'm pretty sure the majority of scientists will weep too, since they spent so much time building so many theories that were distinct from hypothesis, only to have them all revert to the same thing as if they had done nothing to make science a distinct body of research. You can't play fast and loose with that term, it's ridiculous. There needs to be a ranking system from crackpottery to law it doesn't need to be rigid but its categories need to have minimum standards and they do, I'd get used to it. Otherwise we'd have to call about 30 other bodies in the solar system planets as well as Pluto, I don't see that as particularly sensible.

Antiplastic

So you assert, and so you wager, and so you reassert; but so you don't show.

Once again you have to get clear on what you're claiming -- whether "the consensus" (a plurality of physicists? 51%? a supermajority?) thinks it's 1) not a widely accepted scientific theory 2) not a good scientific theory, because it's so hard in practice to test, 3) not even a scientific theory, but rather a mathematical or even philosophical one, or 4) not even a theory in any sense of the word. My understanding of the nuts and bolts of ST is incredibly shallow and humanities-major-ish, and I understand there are compelling arguments for 2 and at least plausible ones for 3, but the insistence in this thread on 4 is frankly bizarre and beyond the pale.

OK. I don't know what you even mean by the phrase "a scientific theory needs nothing at all", much less what view of mine you think this captures. It looks like a sort of undirected blowing off of steam at nothing in particular.

Your prose grows increasingly opaque. I don't know what it means to say that "history was disposed of", or when this is supposed to have happened, or what this has to do with anything.

I'm afraid I just don't recognize any of the content of the previous conversation in the above. "Turning science into philosophy"? "Rich tapestry of imagination in the science door"? It sounds more like open mic night than a response to any of the arguments or examples I've given.

Agrajag

You are at liberty to use language how you will, but you of all people must be aware how often the word theory is used by cranks to describe something that isn't even scientific, let alone having endured repeated attempts at falsification... The Electric Universe theory for instance.

Well thanks for recognizing that our intentions are towards disambiguation, but in that spirit isn't prediction generally understood as an indicator of a new quirk that can be searched for through experimentation? Surely what you mean is that General relativity (or it's behavior) can be derived from String Theory.
Yes this makes String 'whatever' very attractive to physicists as it seems to hold out great promise, unfortunately having not been subjected to any attempts at experimental falsification it's appeal is purely aesthetic.
Oooo gather round students ... look at the beautiful maths!

Well hey I simply googled hypothesis and theory and linked several definitions to show that this differentiation between the standard usage and a more formalized scientific usage exists.

The last link however was an appeal to the scientific community (and one that I personally agree with) to be more careful and exact in using terms.
After-all science uses many words in specific ways that have radically different meanings in the more common context, 'work' being one.

James T

By and large I agree, though for some reason aesthetic descriptions of the universe are often also correct. They are also parsimonious and elegant, frequently, though I understand particle physics has become inelegant.

James T

Reading above, I have a feeling that Antiplastic is just playing semantics.

Agrajag

Antiplastic, you claim that the meaning of words is a matter for Philosophy, I'd have to question your understanding on this as well since you clearly don't seem to know what you are talking about (possibly through messy definitions lol).

The definition of words is not a matter for Philosophy, it is a matter for Linguistics and more specifically Semantics.

Philosophical speculation about language covers the nature of meaning itself, the role of people in communication and the application of language to learning.

Linguistics is the scientific study of languages and is not a branch of philosophy, though it is by it's nature an interdisciplinary approach. It covers the fields of 'Discourse analysis', 'Morphology', ''Phonetics', 'Phonology', 'Semantics' and 'Syntax'.

Semantics is a subset of linguistics and is specifically devoted to the meaning of language it'self at the level of words, phrases e.t.c.

E.G.
The act of Karl Popper in recognizing the need for a theory to have been tested through it's falsifiability for it to be considered scientific was an act of Philosophy, but the resultant redefinition of the word 'theory' to include the Popperian notion of 'falsifiability' was an act of Semantics.

Of course I'd expect anyone as careless with meaning as yourself to confuse the question 'What is meaning?' (philosophy) with the question 'What does this word mean in this context?' (semantics).


Frankly I couldn't care less whether you like or respect what I have linked, it was purely a lazy flit through the web to highlight that while many scientists themselves may use the word 'theory' to describe the String model, and take it to mean "a distinct, formalized and self consistent idea that may be experimentally falsifiable at some point in the future... maybe", in the Popperian sense it cannot be called a theory as it has never been tested and at present cannot be falsified.