http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/19 … #seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
Fundamental doublethink in philosophy of science:
W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London, 1981, p. 55:
"A theory is a set of assertions and if the number of assertions in a theory were finite we might initially seek to explicate the notion of relative verisimilitude in terms of the number of truths and the number of falsehoods contained within the theories. (...) A theory contains all the consequences of the postulates and this set, called the deductive closure of the postulates, is INFINITE IN SIZE."
The consequences of the postulates are obviously a finite number so "INFINITE IN SIZE" is just "the lie one leap ahead of the truth". On the other hand, Newton-Smith is, in my view, a very clever philosopher of science so unfortunately another characteristic of doublethink is relevant in this case:
http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/19 … #seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane."
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Most activity in philosophy of science consists of accounting for or explaining major scientific change. Greatly impressed by the universal shifting of allegiance from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics, and suspecting that there may be some truth in the former, realists construe change as a more or less turbulent movement from less truth to more truth:
W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London, 1981, p. 39: "Consequently our final strengthening of realism involves adding what I call the thesis of verisimilitude (hereafter cited as TV): the historically generated sequence of theories of a mature science is a sequence of theories which are improving in regard to how approximately true they are."
This construal of scientific change is inconsistent with the deductive nature of theories. Deductivism implies that only movements from absolutely false to absolutely true and from absolutely true to absolutely false are possible. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."
By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is true, then all its consequences are true, and IN THIS SENSE the theory is absolutely true.
If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true. This can easily be seen on close inspection of the Michelson-Morley experiment:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive … Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."
Therefore the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the antithesis, c'=c+v, deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its conclusions are true.
Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content and falsity content, largely used in today's philosophy of science, are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either absolutely true or absolutely false. The transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics was either a transition from absolutely false to absolutely true or a transition from absolutely true to absolutely false.
Пенчо Вълев
pvalev@yahoo.com