I have started taking notes on Elliot’s old Evidence and Criticism video playlist. These are my notes from the first three videos. Here is a link to the playlist:
Evidence and Criticism playlist notes:
Evidence 1
- Note on the video series itself:
- See for yourself if what is said is correct or can you see something wrong with it.
- Evidence is useful facts but what’s useful depends on what questions you ask or what problems you have.
- Use evidence to contradict theories or find evidence is consistent with theories (non-contradicting)
- Theories contradicting evidence are false
- Theories consistent with evidence can be true or false
- Evidence itself can be false
- Evidence only helps rule out bad theories
- Example: theories about ball color ruled out by evidence; all red, all green, no red or green, most red, white except w/ tinted glasses
Evidence 2
- What makes experiments produce important evidence?
- What makes new scientific theories good?
- Design experiments with rival theories
- Find consequences of theories that disagree
- Experiment should test the disagreement
- At least one theory will be shown to be incorrect
- Relativity example:
- Newtonian mechanics predicted that light would be deflected by the Sun’s gravity
- Einstein’s theory predicted that the light would be deflected by even more
- Measured deflection turns out to be consistent with Relativity but inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics
- Precession of Mercury example:
- Precession—the change in orientation of the rotational axis of a rotating body (Wikipedia)
- Relativity also predicted correct precession for Mercury, which was a well-known problem
- Relativity also accounted for all other evidence that Newtonian mechanics
Evidence 3
- Mistaken evidence is a problem
- Repeatable experiments
- Carefully keep track of all steps in experiment
- Allows you or someone else to do the same experiment again later
- Compare results from multiple experiments
- Others can read your experiment procedures to find mistakes
- Different results indicate more investigation is required
- Be open to criticism
- Create your own criticisms of your experiment
- Open minded and critically minded at the same time
- If the evidence has a mistake, then either someone knows about the mistake or no one understands the mistake
- No system can catch mistakes that no one understands
- Mistakes have a reason
- Look for causes of mistakes
- Discovering sources of error is progress
- Anything can be mistaken, so evidence is never final
- Use the best theory you know about so far
- A theory that can explain what things are and sources of error contains more knowledge
- Amending a theory to explain evidence is changing the theory
- Contradictory evidence always improves theory
- Either evidence refuted the old theory or added knowledge about sources of error
- Five Summary ideas:
- Repeatable experiments
- Criticism
- Consequences of Mistaken Evidence
- Fallibility
- Learning from Mistaken Evidence