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Epicycle: Difference between revisions
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Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) (Created page with "{{a|cosmology|450px|thumb|center|An [[ad hoc hypothesis yesterday.]]}}In Ptolemaic and other geocentric astronomies, epicycles were necessary fea...") |
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Of course it later became apparent that the planets weren’t orbiting the Earth at all, but were prescribing simple, lazy ellipses around the sun. | Of course it later became apparent that the planets weren’t orbiting the Earth at all, but were prescribing simple, lazy ellipses around the sun. | ||
Why mention this on a wiki largely devoted to complaining about modern legal practice in financial services? Because of its ''metaphorical power'', | Why mention this on a wiki largely devoted to complaining about modern legal practice in financial services? Because of its ''metaphorical power'', of course. The existence of epicycles was classic “[[ad hoc hypothesis]]” — a desperate attempt to shore up a research programme that was otherwise in crisis, because no-one wants to give up a cosmological theory that has worked perfectly well for twelve centuries. | ||
Similar things happen in all protected magisteria — [[paradigm]]s, in [[Thomas Kuhn]]’s terminology —where an intellectual community has invested a good deal of time in constructing an entire ecosystem in which a given discipline can flourish. The moment you find some apparently falsifying data you do not assume the whole intellectual superstructure is shot: you are committed, intellectually and ''emotionally'' to it: you derive your status from it; probably your income too. Instead your first priority is to ''contextualise'' the errant data: check it, make sense of it; ensure it is correct and valid by reference to your own-built intellectual rules; and then build a narrative to explain the apparent anomaly — which as often as not will be “this data is irrelevant”. | |||
{{c2|Astrophysics|Metaphor}} | {{c2|Astrophysics|Metaphor}} | ||