Talk:Ad hoc hypothesis

Writing style
Who is the target audience of this? Quote: "The assumption that people are prone to make up ad hoc hypotheses to defend their world views is criticized by a number of historians of science and philosophers of science as it can lead to allegations of any valid criticism being an attempt to justify a specific theory that is not there. Such allegations can stand in the way of important criticism of flawed methodologies, thus causing the flawed methods to remain in continued use, by allegations that anyone who point out flaws in the methods doing it to defend a purported worldview. The allegations are made unfalsifiable and unable to self-correct by explaining away any criticism of the allegations as rationalization or self-deception. The problem includes false dichotomies that claim that there is a face-off between two world views, missing the point that any number of hypotheses and theories make some predictions that incidentally happen to overlap with predictions made by other hypotheses or theories while also making some unique predictions (e.g. a partial incidental overlap but also key differences of predictions between the obsolete luminiferous aether theory and the modern vacuum energy theory that make the evidence that falsify the former fall outside the predictions made by the latter) which is often confused by "ad hoc" allegers with one hypothesis being a "justification" for another hypothesis with different predictions. False dichotomies cause not only allegations against hypotheses and theories but also against general remarks of flawed methodologies that suggest no specific hypotheses or theories that can dismiss remarks of technical errors in the equipment, remarks of statistical confirmation biases that are due to institutional publication bias between "ordinary claims" and "extraordinary claims" rather than individual brains, remarks of biased searching for other explanations........................"

Run on sentences. False Assumption of reader pre-knowledge means childishly vague (as undefined) clauses and sentences. A list of truisms is not an explanation. I smell some good beef in there however. Try some communication. Cheers!  --2602:306:CFCE:1EE0:3044:A2C3:2683:987B (talk) 17:39, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Doug Bashford

Indeed. At best, this is the rambling of a freshman Philosophy 101 student. At worst, it is a prank or vandalism. In any case, there is no meaningful content there.

I *boldly* edited it down to its essential meaning, which is: "When a methodology is criticized, some people may label that criticism as ad hoc. This is not necessarily true." However, this was immediately undone by our trusty "Editor of the Week", as it "did not appear constructive". Well, Mr. CLCStudent, I challenge you to write a better paragraph on this topic. Maybe even one that has sentences that parse, and that says something meaningful. If you cannot do that, then kindly step aside. What you have done instead is promoted horsepucky over facts and clear language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.83.67.111 (talk) 21:09, 19 March 2019 (UTC)


 * The paragraph is at best opaque. If it is not meaningful to anybody, then it contributes nothing, and should be deleted (regardless of source citations). catslash (talk) 11:49, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree that this paragraph should be edited or (more probably) removed. It is composed of complex, run-on sentences that are difficult to understand. And it's difficult to suggest a simple edit because it's not easy to decipher exactly what the paragraph is trying to say. It's especially distracting since it's the largest section on the page. I get the feeling it's trying to make some counterpoint to a point that hasn't been made on this page, but again, it's difficult for me to read it clearly. 66.219.244.146 (talk) 17:09, 30 October 2019 (UTC)


 * It's gone (for now).catslash (talk) 22:40, 30 October 2019 (UTC)