*I'm fundamentally following Kuhn and ilk in this (whoever Mr. and Ms. Ilk are), except Kuhn would occasionally say something such as a nomenclature isn't a candidate for true or false, so he presumably wouldn't have agreed with my second assumption, that rejecting a theory is equivalent to calling it false. I'm damned if I know why he said such things, or why he wouldn't agree with my assumption. "Astrology is false" is a fine sentence.** Seemingly, although Kuhn had rejected empiricist philosophy's concept of truth, he nonetheless wanted to retain empiricist philosophy's definition of "true" as "matching theory-free evidence" or some such. The only reason I can think of for his accepting such a restriction is that this way he could hang onto the dream that philosophy could still have something deep and interesting and all-encompassing to say about capital-T Truth.
**But that's not all there is to say about astrology.
it's not wrong (or false or untrue or superseded or worthless or vacuous or whatever) until it's been replaced Er, this could be misinterpreted as "Frank thinks it was right and then became wrong when it was replaced, so he's saying that it was once right, even if it's wrong now." Well, there are plenty of statements that were once right and are now wrong, e.g., "There are dodos on the earth," but that's not a theory in the sense that I'm talking about. I'm thinking more of statements like "the earth is the center of the universe," which was never true but was once almost universally believed to be true, in concert at different times and places with various theories and cosmologies that have since been thoroughly modified or abandoned. Anyway, I'm not saying it was ever true. So I'm not saying it was true but became false; rather, that it wasn't shown to be false until it was replaced (and of course it wasn't abandoned by everybody at once). So let's say
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**But that's not all there is to say about astrology.
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Er, this could be misinterpreted as "Frank thinks it was right and then became wrong when it was replaced, so he's saying that it was once right, even if it's wrong now." Well, there are plenty of statements that were once right and are now wrong, e.g., "There are dodos on the earth," but that's not a theory in the sense that I'm talking about. I'm thinking more of statements like "the earth is the center of the universe," which was never true but was once almost universally believed to be true, in concert at different times and places with various theories and cosmologies that have since been thoroughly modified or abandoned. Anyway, I'm not saying it was ever true. So I'm not saying it was true but became false; rather, that it wasn't shown to be false until it was replaced (and of course it wasn't abandoned by everybody at once). So let's say ( ... )
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