Due: Friday, March 24.

 

Read “Criteria of Adequacy” from How to Think About Weird Things by Schick and Vaughn on the reserve reading list.^* (Reserve List). (Background for this reading will be presented in class on March 22.) Then answer the following questions. A paragraph or two on each question will suffice.

 

1) Discuss: Schick and Vaughn say that the gremlin hypothesis is not testable. But I’ve got a gremlinometer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It indicates whether there are gremlins present. When you break open a fluorescent light, the meter indicates that there are a lot of gremlins present. So the hypothesis is testable.

 

2) In the last paragraph on p. 197, Schick and Vaughn discuss an example about baldness. This is supposed to cast some light on the issue about theories that they were discussing in the previous paragraph. In what ways is the issue about theories discussed in the previous paragraph similar to this example about baldness? In what ways is it different?

 

* Parts of the photocopy on reserve are terrible. I apologize for this. On the back of this page are clarifications of what is illegible in the photocopy.

Clarifications of the illegible portions of the reserve reading:

 

p. 188, last paragraph (starting with the dark box0

 

A hypothesis is scientific only it is testable, that is, only if it predicts something more than what is predicted by the background theory alone.

 

The gremlin hypothesis predicts that if we turn on a fluorescent light,

it will emit light. But this action doesn’t mean that the gremlin hy-

pothesis is testable, because the fact that fluorescent lights emit light

is what the gremlin hypothesis was introduced to explain. That fact is

part of its background theory. To be testable, a hypothesis must make

a prediction that goes beyond its background theory. A prediction

tells us that if certain conditions are realized, then certain results will

be observed. If a prediction can be derived from a hypothesis and its

 

p. 189, top right: ignore this

 

p. 190, last line, first words: facts we

 

p. 191, near bottom, dark box

 

Other things being equal, the best hypothesis is the one that is the most fruitful, that is, makes the most successful novel predictions.

 

p. 193, top right: ignore this.

 

p. 194, dark box

 

Other things being equal, the best hypothesis is the one that has the greatest scope, that is, that explains and predicts the most diverse phenomena.

 

p. 194, last few lines:

              virtue, He wrote, I do not by any means find the chief significance of

the general theory of relativity in the fact that it has predicted a few

minute observable facts, but rather in the simplicity of its foundation

and in its logical consistency.” For Einstein, simplicity is a theoreti-

cal virtue par excellence.

Simplicity is notoriously difficult to define. For our purposes,

however, we may say that the simpler of two hypotheses is the one

 

p. 196, dark box:

 

Other things being equal, the best hypothesis is the simplest one, that is, the one that makes the fewest assumptions.

 

p. 197, dark box:

 

Other things being equal, the best hypothesis is the one that is the most conservative, that is, the one that fits best with established beliefs.

 

p. 197, lower left, here are the first words of each line of the last paragraph, starting with the line 4:

night, less, -ness, that, cases, wrong, If, would, scientific, fails.