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scientific explanations, discoveries, and revolutions; descriptions, analogies and folk psychology

I'm kicking around some ideas about world view, paradigm, truth, belief, explanation, description and folk psychology.  I'll probably revise this a number of times...

In the case of a scientific discovery or revolution, the new explanation uses analogies taken from the world as known prior to that revolution or discovery; hence the new paradigm necessarily assumes that there is something truthful about the previous understanding of the world: the analogies in the new paradigm are always parasitic (in a good way) upon the old.

When a new opinion replaces an old one, it justifies this (or attempts to do so) by referring to beliefs previously and still held to be true.

All scientific revolutions necessarily presuppose the truth of some part of the prescientific world view (aka "Lebenswelt").  To accept any one part of the prescientific world view, however, one must grant that human agency is what it seems to be: we must grant that we can perceive at least some things as they are, know and judge them to be as they are, recall the past, etc.

One who claims to be employing science to challenge our most basic beliefs about agency is making that challenge on the basis of beliefs that presuppose the truth of what is being challenged.  To do that is absurd.

Perhaps a kind of infinite regress argument about explanations can be constructed that would show that every explanation presupposes an unexplained belief, which we call a description.

Our basic beliefs about agency and stuff like that are thoroughly prescientific--and indispensable. They are not explanatory but descriptive; hence the term "folk psychology" is a straw man, inasmuch as it treats what is a description as if it were an explanation.

The last claim requires that causality itself be something we can see and understand before we engage in explanation of any sort.

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