It is a capital mistake to theorize before

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. "Sherlock Holmes, speaking in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Scandal in Bohemia" Induction, my dear Watson! Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is part of US Public Domain.

Image of “Elephant and the Blind Men” removed due to copyright, but can be found at jainworld. com.

Map exercise

Thomas Kuhn Image from Amazon. com. Structure of Scientific Revolutions Image from Wikipedia used under educational use rationale. Blah version Spaced-out version

Paradigm shifts: A change in basic assumptions within the ruling framework of science. "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share. ” - Kuhn, 1997 The humanities do not have paradigms, in the sense of Kuhn. Image from Amazon. com.

Evolution of Science Normal Science Puzzle solving Emergence of Anomalies Crisis and Emergence of Scientific Theories Extraordinary Science and Scientific Revolutions Resolution to Revolution and Paradigm shift Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Karl Popper Falsifiability Image from Wikipedia. Image removed due to copyright: Werner Horvath: Sir Charles Popper: Plato's Fall and the Falsification, oil on canvas painting. See cover pictures page. Earthly Cosmic What’s the deal with weird graphics about social scientist?

Vienna (Austria) in the 1920 s “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930) Everybody likes this sex-stuff But, it isn’t science Image from Wikimedia Commons. Sigmund Freud Image from Wikipedia. Karl Popper

To counter this and other pseudo-sciences, Popper became strict and rigid in his definition of science. Science was about falsification of theory. Period. Image removed due to copyright: Werner Horvath: Sir Charles Popper: Plato's Fall and the Falsification, oil on canvas painting. See myspace. com Austrian art photos. And I like you even less when you are psychadelic. Period. Image from Wikipedia.

I don’t think falsifying experiences exist. Kuhn (in un-cosmic form) Image from Wikipedia used under educational use rationale. First, no theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time. Second, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterize normal science. Last, if any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times.

This leads to a bit of a problem: Scientific theories often are not, in a strict sense, capable of being falsified. One cannot, in practice, isolate individual statements or hypotheses that form the foundation of a theory to test whether they are true or false. Image removed due to copyright: Jim Henson’s Beaker and Bunsen running an experiment No image problems here One can, however, use experiments, deductions, and/or predictions to test different, overlapping hypotheses. As scholar Pierre Duhem states it, ‘hypotheses are tested in bundles. '

1950 s: The bathymetry of the ocean floor. Image from Wikipedia used under educational reuse rationale. Image removed due to copyright. 2001 image of Marie Tharp is available from Earth Institute. Image from Earth Institute. Bruce Heezen Marie Tharp