Editing Scientific theory (section)

==Descriptions==

===From philosophers of science===
[[Karl Popper]] described the characteristics of a scientific theory as follows:<ref name=Popper>[[Karl Popper|Popper, Karl]] (1963), ''Conjectures and Refutations'', Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, UK. Reprinted in [[Theodore Schick]] (ed., 2000), ''Readings in the Philosophy of Science'', Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, Calif.</ref>
# It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations.
# Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory—an event which would have refuted the theory.
# Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things from happening. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
# A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
# Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
# Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory, and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence".)
# Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, might still be upheld by their admirers—for example by introducing post hoc (after the fact) some auxiliary hypothesis or assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory post hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status, by [[tampering with evidence]]. The temptation to tamper can be minimized by first taking the time to write down the testing protocol before embarking on the scientific work.

Popper summarized these statements by saying that the central criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its "falsifiability, or refutability, or testability".<ref name=Popper/> Echoing this, [[Stephen Hawking]] states, "A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations." He also discusses the "unprovable but falsifiable" nature of theories, which is a necessary consequence of inductive logic, and that "you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory".<ref>{{cite book | author=Hawking, Stephen | title= A Brief History of Time | url=https://archive.org/details/briefhistoryofti00step_1 | url-access=registration | publisher=[[Bantam Books]] | year=1988 | isbn=978-0-553-38016-3}}</ref>

Several philosophers and historians of science have, however, argued that Popper's definition of theory as a set of falsifiable statements is wrong<ref>Hempel. C.G. 1951 "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning" in ''Aspects of Scientific Explanation''. Glencoe: the Free Press. Quine, W.V.O 1952 "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" reprinted in ''From a Logical Point of View''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press</ref> because, as [[Philip Kitcher]] has pointed out, if one took a strictly Popperian view of "theory", observations of Uranus when first discovered in 1781 would have "falsified" Newton's celestial mechanics. Rather, people suggested that another planet influenced Uranus' orbit—and this prediction was indeed eventually confirmed.

Kitcher agrees with Popper that "There is surely something right in the idea that a science can succeed only if it can fail."<ref name=Kitcher>Philip Kitcher 1982 ''Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism'', pp. 45–48. Cambridge: The MIT Press</ref> He also says that scientific theories include statements that cannot be falsified, and that good theories must also be creative. He insists we view scientific theories as an "elaborate collection of statements", some of which are not falsifiable, while others—those he calls "auxiliary hypotheses", are.

According to Kitcher, good scientific theories must have three features:<ref name=Kitcher/>
# Unity: "A science should be unified.... Good theories consist of just one problem-solving strategy, or a small family of problem-solving strategies, that can be applied to a wide range of problems."
# [[Fecundity]]: "A great scientific theory, like Newton's, opens up new areas of research.... Because a theory presents a new way of looking at the world, it can lead us to ask new questions, and so to embark on new and fruitful lines of inquiry.... Typically, a flourishing science is incomplete. At any time, it raises more questions than it can currently answer. But incompleteness is not vice. On the contrary, incompleteness is the mother of fecundity.... A good theory should be productive; it should raise new questions and presume those questions can be answered without giving up its problem-solving strategies."
# Auxiliary hypotheses that are independently testable: "An auxiliary hypothesis ought to be testable independently of the particular problem it is introduced to solve, independently of the theory it is designed to save." (For example, the evidence for the existence of Neptune is independent of the anomalies in Uranus's orbit.)

Like other definitions of theories, including Popper's, Kitcher makes it clear that a theory must include statements that have observational consequences. But, like the observation of irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, falsification is only one possible consequence of observation. The production of new hypotheses is another possible and equally important result.

===Analogies and metaphors===
The concept of a scientific theory has also been described using analogies and metaphors. For example, the logical empiricist [[Carl Gustav Hempel]] likened the structure of a scientific theory to a "complex spatial network:"

<blockquote> Its terms are represented by the knots, while the threads connecting the latter correspond, in part, to the definitions and, in part, to the fundamental and derivative hypotheses included in the theory. The whole system floats, as it were, above the plane of observation and is anchored to it by the rules of interpretation. These might be viewed as strings which are not part of the network but link certain points of the latter with specific places in the plane of observation. By virtue of these interpretive connections, the network can function as a scientific theory: From certain observational data, we may ascend, via an interpretive string, to some point in the theoretical network, thence proceed, via definitions and hypotheses, to other points, from which another interpretive string permits a descent to the plane of observation.<ref>Hempel CG 1952. ''Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science.'' (Volume 2, #7 of ''Foundations of the Unity of Science. Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science''). University of Chicago Press, p. 36.</ref></blockquote>

[[Michael Polanyi]] made an analogy between a theory and a map:

<blockquote>A theory is something other than myself. It may be set out on paper as a system of rules, and it is the more truly a theory the more completely it can be put down in such terms. Mathematical theory reaches the highest perfection in this respect. But even a geographical map fully embodies in itself a set of strict rules for finding one's way through a region of otherwise uncharted experience. Indeed, all theory may be regarded as a kind of map extended over space and time.<ref>Polanyi M. 1958. ''Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.'' London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 4.</ref></blockquote>

A scientific theory can also be thought of as a book that captures the fundamental information about the world, a book that must be researched, written, and shared. In 1623, [[Galileo Galilei]] wrote:

<blockquote>Philosophy [i.e. physics] is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.<ref>Galileo Galilei, ''The Assayer'', as translated by [[Stillman Drake]] (1957), ''Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo'' pp. 237–38.</ref></blockquote>

The book metaphor could also be applied in the following passage, by the contemporary philosopher of science [[Ian Hacking]]:

<blockquote>I myself prefer an Argentine fantasy. God did not write a Book of Nature of the sort that the old Europeans imagined. He wrote a [[Jorge Luis Borges|Borgesian]] library, each book of which is as brief as possible, yet each book of which is inconsistent with every other. No book is redundant. For every book there is some humanly accessible bit of Nature such that that book, and no other, makes possible the comprehension, prediction and influencing of what is going on...Leibniz said that God chose a world which maximized the variety of phenomena while choosing the simplest laws. Exactly so: but the best way to maximize phenomena and have simplest laws is to have the laws inconsistent with each other, each applying to this or that but none applying to all.<ref>Hacking I. 1983. ''Representing and Intervening.'' Cambridge University Press, p. 219.</ref></blockquote>