Hi Elephant,
ELEPHANT:
Is it more *coherent* to suppose that scientific laws are
invented, or that they are discovered?
'Well, discovered, obviously! After all it would be thoroughly incoherent
to say that the moon only began orbiting the earth in Newton's lifetime!'
Well that's true. But then, it's also completely irrelevant.
Well, I'm glad you agree with me, but you lost me about why it's
irrelevent. And then the stuff about the alarm clock makes it sound
like you don't agree afterall. Is it just that you like to argue?
GLENN WROTE (previously):
science has shown in the 20th century that light of distant
galaxies, which took thousands of years to reach us, form a spiral
shape, and Newton's gravity is partly responsible for that shape. This
shows gravity predates Newton and so he discovered, not invented it.
ELEPHANT:
I've recently bought an alarm clock.
It tells the time.
I have a french clock from 1850 that I inherited from my grandmother
It also tells the time.
The old clock and the new clock are (nearly) in accord.
Therefore:
My new alarm clock was built in 1850.
Not a very good argument, I think you will agree. But exactly your
argument:
The old galaxy and newtonian Gravity are (nearly) in accord.
Therefore:
My newtonian gravity was buit when the galaxy was built.
Codswallop you will agree - and naturally what you won't agree to is my
characterisation of your argument. Well, put me right.
It's just a bad analogy. You are proposing that the argument about your
grandmother's clock and my argument about gravity pre-dating Newton are
exactly the same, and since your clock argument is ridiculous, so must
mine. But the two arguments are clearly not identical.
In your intentionally bogus argument the premise includes two clocks,
one new and one old. *Any* intervening statements, such that the clocks
tell time and are in accord, are irrelevent because the conclustion that
the "new alarm clock was built in 1850" is wrong for the trivial reason
that it was new.
Even if you remove this defect from your argument, the analogy with mine
is troubled for other reasons, and indeed the following points about our
arguments illustrates the problem with analogies in general; there are
just too many dissimilarities in the objects being compared:
1) the old and new clocks are in accord, or nearly so, only after you set
the clocks to the same time and wind them. One will wind down and stop
before the other one does, at which time they are no longer in accord.
There is no similar notion to setting the old gravity with the new gravity
for them to be in accord, nor is there a notion of gravity winding down.
2) the accordance in your argument was direct and between two like things
(clocks). The accordance in my argument was indirect and between three
unlike things (gravity, the law of gravity, and the shape of a galaxy).
3) your argument shows the folly in always believing that two things that
were created both have to be created at the same time. My argument shows
that two things thought to be created at different times are really one
thing that was discovered.
4) your argument shows that two clocks are in accord in the present. You
didn't show that the clock, as it ran in 1850, was in accord with the
one you recently purchased. My argument effectively sees back in time and
makes a case that gravity was behaving in accord with Newton's law at
different junctures in history.
Glenn
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