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"Your Logic Tutor" <ylt...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:AOidnRXEZpU99WvZnZ2dnUVZ_vydnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "Sean" <relaxing@earth> wrote
>
>> I don;t agree with princeton
>
> Try Copi's textbook, _Introduction to Logic_
>
Gee, I'm blushing at your selective snipping.
Quote: I don;t agree with princeton, but only from a semantic pov.
Did I say I rejected logic? No. I also didn't say that argument ad
ignorantiam was a fallacy. But thanks for the quotes.
> <quote>
> Famous in the history of science is the argument _ad ignorantiam_ given in
> criticism of Galileo, when he showed leading astronomers of his time the
> mountains and valleys on the moon that could be seen through his
> telescope.
> Some scholars of that age, absolutely convinced that the moon was a
> perfect
> sphere, as theology and Aristotelian science had long taught, argued
> against
> Galileo that, although we see what appear to be mountains and valleys, the
> moon is in fact a perfect sphere, because all its apparent irregularities
> are filled in by an invisible crystalline substance. And this hypothesis,
> which saves the perfection of the heavenly bodies, Galileo could not prove
> false!
>
>
> Galileo, to expose the argument _ad ignorantium_, offered another of the
> same kind as a caricature. Unable to prove the nonexistence of the
> transparent crystal supposedly filling the valleys, he put forward the
> equally probable hypothesis that there were, rearing up from the invisible
> crystalline envelope on the moon, even greater mountain peaks -- but made
> of crystal and thus invisible! And this hypothesis his critics could not
> prove false.
> </quote>
> (Copi and Cohen, _Introduction to Logic_)
>
>
> [In this case the term, 'hypothesis' means conjecture, a speculative,
> 'might
> be' imagining with no basis in fact.]
>
>
>
>
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