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That's still simply luck; unfounded intuition is meaningless as it's wrong more often than not. That's it's occasionally correct is coincidence.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then? That's what I mean by disingenuous; some credit has to be given to those that are right. There are an infinite number of wrong intuitions.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  No, scientific progress comes from empirically chasing down and disproving false intuitions so that only the few true ones remain. Intuition creates hypothesis, empiricism makes them useful since nearly all intuitions are wrong. It's the empiricists that deserve the credit, they are why science works and of course are generally the ones with the intuitions that are correct as well. And you can't say vitalists were right, they've made no predictions: calling something magic woo woo isn't a hypothesis that can be proven right.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Which begs the question: where did the correct intuitions come from? Can't be random; there are billions of wrong ideas and only 1 right one. So some weight has to be given to intuitions, and some props to those who had the right ones. Because that's how progress gets made.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      > Which begs the question: where did the correct intuitions come from? Logic. > Can't be random; there are billions of wrong ideas and only 1 right one. It's not random, it's deductions based on previously known truths. > So some weight has to be given to intuitions, and some props to those who had the right ones. Because that's how progress gets made. Props are given to those people, they're called scientists. There are no correct intuitions from the vitalists, they're claim is magic... that's not in any way useful.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then? Correct hypotheses are, in a sense, a product of fortune, and scientific progress requires them to happen sometimes, so, in a sense, that's true. Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. The scientific method can be viewed as simply a method of filtering out the intuitions without utility and promoting those (if any) that have utility. It is a way to avoid wasting the good fortune of the intuition of forming useful hypothesis, and avoiding the waste demonstrably fruitless intuitions. > some credit has to be given to those that are right But vitalism is so vague as to be untestable, and justifies no useful models. "Some (unspecified elements of) living things are not governed by physical law" is indistinguishable in effect from "We have not yet discovered the physical laws governing (some elements of) living things".
  - habitue 11y ago
    > Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. A minor disagreement on this point. I think often our intuitions are shaped by experience, and lead us to conclusions that we don't have a rational line of inference to (at least one we can explain). Science acts as a good filter, saying "we don't care how you came up with it, test it and we'll agree if it turns out it's right". This isn't a random guess, but it's far from reasoning you could convince anyone else with. This is different from a lucky guess. Your brain has been seeing a lot of the data, and is picking up on patterns, in other words your intuition is correlated with the phenomena, and that's what leads you to the theory you want to test. Second, sometimes purely rational arguments lead us to theories from other data. This isn't random chance, but it is exploiting regularities in the world around us to predict new things. For example, kepler's laws of motion weren't the direct result of observation. You can't observe equations that guide the motion of the planets. In between observations, the planets might have jumped all over the place. But it was assumed that the planets weren't doing that, and simple equations were inferred from the data available that fit the evidence. There is a step here between "observation" and "prediction" that doesn't involve a lucky guess.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then? That's what I mean by disingenuous; some credit has to be given to those that are right. There are an infinite number of wrong intuitions.

gnaritas 11y ago
No, scientific progress comes from empirically chasing down and disproving false intuitions so that only the few true ones remain. Intuition creates hypothesis, empiricism makes them useful since nearly all intuitions are wrong. It's the empiricists that deserve the credit, they are why science works and of course are generally the ones with the intuitions that are correct as well. And you can't say vitalists were right, they've made no predictions: calling something magic woo woo isn't a hypothesis that can be proven right.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Which begs the question: where did the correct intuitions come from? Can't be random; there are billions of wrong ideas and only 1 right one. So some weight has to be given to intuitions, and some props to those who had the right ones. Because that's how progress gets made.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    > Which begs the question: where did the correct intuitions come from? Logic. > Can't be random; there are billions of wrong ideas and only 1 right one. It's not random, it's deductions based on previously known truths. > So some weight has to be given to intuitions, and some props to those who had the right ones. Because that's how progress gets made. Props are given to those people, they're called scientists. There are no correct intuitions from the vitalists, they're claim is magic... that's not in any way useful.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then? Correct hypotheses are, in a sense, a product of fortune, and scientific progress requires them to happen sometimes, so, in a sense, that's true. Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. The scientific method can be viewed as simply a method of filtering out the intuitions without utility and promoting those (if any) that have utility. It is a way to avoid wasting the good fortune of the intuition of forming useful hypothesis, and avoiding the waste demonstrably fruitless intuitions. > some credit has to be given to those that are right But vitalism is so vague as to be untestable, and justifies no useful models. "Some (unspecified elements of) living things are not governed by physical law" is indistinguishable in effect from "We have not yet discovered the physical laws governing (some elements of) living things".
- habitue 11y ago
  > Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress. A minor disagreement on this point. I think often our intuitions are shaped by experience, and lead us to conclusions that we don't have a rational line of inference to (at least one we can explain). Science acts as a good filter, saying "we don't care how you came up with it, test it and we'll agree if it turns out it's right". This isn't a random guess, but it's far from reasoning you could convince anyone else with. This is different from a lucky guess. Your brain has been seeing a lot of the data, and is picking up on patterns, in other words your intuition is correlated with the phenomena, and that's what leads you to the theory you want to test. Second, sometimes purely rational arguments lead us to theories from other data. This isn't random chance, but it is exploiting regularities in the world around us to predict new things. For example, kepler's laws of motion weren't the direct result of observation. You can't observe equations that guide the motion of the planets. In between observations, the planets might have jumped all over the place. But it was assumed that the planets weren't doing that, and simple equations were inferred from the data available that fit the evidence. There is a step here between "observation" and "prediction" that doesn't involve a lucky guess.