Form: Short Note

IMPROVING PARSIMONY OF THE CLAIM THAT ALL THEORIES ARE EVENTUALLY FALSIFIED

Better way of saying it. There is one most parsimonious paradigm (We call it science. Now I call it ‘P’ or ‘testimony’).

—“All paradigms are eventually false. :)”—

That’s demonstrably false. Instead, we increasingly identify limits that cause us to increase the parsimony of our theories.

All scientific paradigms appear increase in parsimony. Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein all evolve to greater precision. Take Humors (disease) and Phlogiston theory (chemistry), Einstein’s static universe(cosmology), or the expanding earth (plate tectonics). They were false but they were progress in the right direction.

Conversely there are three categories that always fail to increase in parsimony:

1) Magic -> Pseudoscience (action-physical)

2) Idealism -> Philosophy (verbal-rational)

3) Occult -> Theology (emotional-intuitionistic)

So we have deflationary grammars of

1) Science, 2)Logic, and 3) Mathematics that all increase in parsimony.

And we have inflationary grammars of 1) magic(physical), 2) idealism(verbal), and 3) the occult(emotional) that fail all tests of parsimony.

Of course we also have the outright deceits too.