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FLWAB's avatar

You have more patience than I do: if I was in such a debate and got muted like that, I would refuse to move on to any other point. Which probably isn't the most strategic move, but by gum my temper would not allow anything else. Good on you for having a cool head!

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Michael's avatar

I once spoke with someone vaguely sympathetic to TJump on the matter of the importance of prediction for theories. They were not half as hardcore, so I asked for a paper describing their view on the matter. They sent me a paper by Roger White (03) which defended strong predictionism. In the paper, it said that strong predictionism is unfairly strawmanned as super-strong predictionism, the view that the fact that a theory predicted rather than accommodated a datum is evidence in itself for the theory. He said that “it is not clear that anyone has explicitly endorsed this thesis” (I figure Lakatos did though). After reading that part, I replied to the person who sent it to me that TJump was, in fact, a Super-Duper Strong Predictionist, which is two standard deviations more extreme than the strawman-which-no-one-has-ever-explicitly-endorsed strong predictionism. My interlocutor found that to be quite agreeable. I think the name should stick

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