|
There is a creative dimension to the abductive logic that drives scientific inquiry. If we don't have folks cooking up crazy hypotheses every now and then we might as well give up on the idea of scientific revolution. If I am remembering correctly, Kepler himself parsed through 22 hypotheses--some of them completely insane--over 20 years in an attempt to explain Tycho Brahe's meticulously kept data. Abduction often calls for moments of irrational transition between two paradigms. It is only after a paradigm shift that successful science entrenches itself, in part, by retrospectively concealing the irrational moment in a narrative that makes it seem as if the progressive shift between paradigms was completely rational.
I suppose what I'm saying is that, in order to harbor a Galileo, Newton or Einstein, we must also be prepared to harbor all the relative failures of their generation. In other words, theoretical diversity in science should be encouraged no matter how insane it seems!
|