The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #160033 Message #3795406
Posted By: DMcG
13-Jun-16 - 04:23 PM
Thread Name: BS: Logic and the laws of science
Subject: RE: BS: Logic and the laws of science
I agree it is important to continue to question things, Donuel. When I refer to "snake oil" I normally mean unscrupulous people deliberately using fakery to exploit the unwary. That's a different thing to carrying out thought experiments and drawing on subjective experience to trying to make sense of something. And it is perfectly possible to use logic to do that as long as you remain tentative about the conclusions. You can also use informal logic "it seems reasonable that ..." , but at an even greater risk.
Going back to Bill's summary: while it is always useful to remember that from a false premise, anything can be proved, it is also as important to look at it the opposite way round: a true conclusion tells us nothing about the truth of the premise. This is why it is important that a well designed scientific experiment is designed to disprove things, most commonly the 'null hypothesis'. it is also why cognitive therapy, for example, places so much stress in things feared not happening, and equally it suggests why confirmation bias is such a problem:they see a true result and assume the premise is true, which they can't.