Not necesssarily trying to reawken this thread, though it was certainly fun,
but I ran into this online and thought the people who participated in it
might be interested in the paper and might want to comment on it. In my
opinion, Lakatos has the best thought-out "Philosophy of Science" and I was
basing my rambling arguments on it or at least some poorly understood
version of it:


http://www.philosophy.ru/edu/ref/sci/lakatos.html

Note: The paper seems to have been typed in without much proof-reading and
it wasn't formatted for the web, so there are footnotes embedded in the
middle which you must scroll past to finish the article.



--
New definition of irony:

'Today's liberal Democrats are like the supporters of the Third Reich of the
'30's and '40's
- they absolutely trusted the government to "make things right". '
-Comment made on the internet by an ardent GW Bush supporter.

Lawson English wrote:
[snip]

Lakatos has the best thought-out "Philosophy of Science"

My bull**** meter just pegged, but it wasn't even hooked up yet. What
empirically falsifable predictions does he make? None. It is a
manure pile borne on a stout flow of hot air. He has Karl Popper up
his ass.

"I have discussed the problem of objective appraisal of scientific
growth in terms of progressive and degenerating problemshifts in
series of scientific theories."

"The R&D Function" Harvard Business Review 61(6) 195 (1983)
Hey git - the emperor is naked. Lakatos cannot maintain parallelism
in even one sentence, and he flaunts compound neologisms as though
they had meaning. What you write is what you think. Lakatos is an
intellecutal cripple.

Imre Lakatos is an avatar of winespeak, artspeak, Wall Street-speak -
the whole grandiloquent scholarly masturbative exercise that invested
300 years praising Michelangelo's "masterful use of light and shadow"
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling... when it was nothing but accumulated
candle soot. Give it a cleaning and it is bright and colorful as a
comic book. Michelangelo had everybody's (diminutive - poor David)
genitalia hanging out, too. The loincloths are Church-imposed
censorship after the fact.

and I was
basing my rambling arguments on it or at least some poorly understood
version of it:
[snip]

Thank you for sharing. Not.

adumbrated
negative heuristic
metaphysical principles
anti-conventiolnalist rule
Cartesian metaphysics
modus tollens
contrived micro-example
justificationist conventionalism
Kuhnian crisis
factual novelty
methodological tolerance
mome stability
conflict between fallibility and criticis

Mad-Libs, anybody?

The Acme School of Philosophy will allow you to become a practicing
commercial philosopher with only a year of home study. This easy
pamphlet will evaluate your philosophic ability. Our expert
counselors will then guide you into theological, humanistic,
deconstuctionist, used car salesman, or stochastic irrationalist
studies to develop your full talents of dissemination and mawkish
diatribe. Call now and we will send you absolutely free 1000 obscure
nouns, 1000 agrammatical adjectives, and 1000 compound neologisms
translated (and not!) from German landfill consignments.

Mind puke.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!

So, you're saying that nothing he says makes sense?

Thanks for sharing.

Anyone else have anything to "contribute?"

--
New definition of irony:

'Today's liberal Democrats are like the supporters of the Third Reich of the
'30's and '40's
- they absolutely trusted the government to "make things right". '
-Comment made on the internet by an ardent GW Bush supporter.

"Uncle Al" wrote in message
...
Lawson English wrote:
[snip]

Lakatos has the best thought-out "Philosophy of Science"

My bull**** meter just pegged, but it wasn't even hooked up yet. What
empirically falsifable predictions does he make? None. It is a
manure pile borne on a stout flow of hot air. He has Karl Popper up
his ass.

"I have discussed the problem of objective appraisal of scientific
growth in terms of progressive and degenerating problemshifts in
series of scientific theories."

"The R&D Function" Harvard Business Review 61(6) 195 (1983)
Hey git - the emperor is naked. Lakatos cannot maintain parallelism
in even one sentence, and he flaunts compound neologisms as though
they had meaning. What you write is what you think. Lakatos is an
intellecutal cripple.

Imre Lakatos is an avatar of winespeak, artspeak, Wall Street-speak -
the whole grandiloquent scholarly masturbative exercise that invested
300 years praising Michelangelo's "masterful use of light and shadow"
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling... when it was nothing but accumulated
candle soot. Give it a cleaning and it is bright and colorful as a
comic book. Michelangelo had everybody's (diminutive - poor David)
genitalia hanging out, too. The loincloths are Church-imposed
censorship after the fact.

and I was
basing my rambling arguments on it or at least some poorly understood
version of it:
[snip]

Thank you for sharing. Not.

adumbrated
negative heuristic
metaphysical principles
anti-conventiolnalist rule
Cartesian metaphysics
modus tollens
contrived micro-example
justificationist conventionalism
Kuhnian crisis
factual novelty
methodological tolerance
mome stability
conflict between fallibility and criticis

Mad-Libs, anybody?

The Acme School of Philosophy will allow you to become a practicing
commercial philosopher with only a year of home study. This easy
pamphlet will evaluate your philosophic ability. Our expert
counselors will then guide you into theological, humanistic,
deconstuctionist, used car salesman, or stochastic irrationalist
studies to develop your full talents of dissemination and mawkish
diatribe. Call now and we will send you absolutely free 1000 obscure
nouns, 1000 agrammatical adjectives, and 1000 compound neologisms
translated (and not!) from German landfill consignments.

Mind puke.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!