Re: Genealogy For The Beginner

In message of 16 Feb, Haines Brown <brownh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

<snip>

> In the philosophy of science, all observations entail unproven
> observational hypotheses (Lakatos).

This is perhaps the core of your somewhat positivistic analysis.

The question to ask is how could you possibly prove any observational
hypothesis?

I suspect your notion of proof does not allow you to establish the trust
of any observational hypothesis.  So all observations are rubbish!

But this goes against the thoughts of the majority of mankind, if not
all of such.  Observations are not rubbish, they may be mistaken, they
may be misremembered but they can very definitely be true, in fact the
overwhelming majority of observations are true.  If you start from
there, you have a very different analysis of truths and far less
difficulty in coping with the truths or not of written re****ts and
inferences from facts. 

-- 
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/