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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Layman's argument for Occam's razor
Message-ID: <588@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 10:08:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: l.588
Posted: Sun Oct  4 10:08:23 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Oct-87 05:54:03 EDT
References: <433@morgoth.UUCP> <20264@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <294@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 35
Summary: I will argue both sides

In article <294@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>, flash@inference.ee.qmc.ac.uk (Flash Sheridan) writes:
> In article <20264@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> kube@cogsci.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Paul Kube) writes:
> >In article <433@morgoth.UUCP> dmb@morgoth.UUCP (David M. Brown) writes:
> > do you really mean to suggest that you can tell if
> >a serious empirical theory is true just by thinking about it?
> >
> According to Einstein, yes.  He claimed he developed Special
> Relativity for its harmony with Maxwell's equations, _before_
> Michelson-Morley.

Certainly William of Ockham, and until recently most philosophers,
believed that it is easy to find "true" theories, and that it is
not difficult to test these theories.  Now it may be that the speed
of light in vacuum is constant, but there is no way to directly test
it.  In fact, according to most of what I read in modern physics, there
is no vacuum!  Thus the real problem is "when should we accept a theory
which we cannot completely test, or which we may even know to be false."
Since there is no vacuum, the Special Relativity transformations, if we
could obtain sufficiently accurate data, would not agree with Einstein's
predictions exactly.

There is no question that the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations were
obtained as the set of transformations which preserve Maxwell's equations
before Michelson-Morley, and that Special Relativity follows from these
equations if the speed of light is assumed constant.  However, while the
development does not involve any empirical observations, Maxwell used,
possibly indirectly, empirical results.

On the other hand, I completely disagree that one infers natural laws from
empirical observations!  One only chooses which mental construct to use
among those which the mind can conceive on the basis of observations.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (ARPA or UUCP) or hrubin@purccvm.bitnet