MISLED REALISM IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

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/arch.../02/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.

Pentcho Valev