This book argues that irrationality is no hinderance to something being true?

[Betty]

This book by colin leslie dean argues that irrationality is no hinderance to something being true
http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books/philosophy/irrationality.pdf
Absurdities or meaninglessness or irrationality is no hindrance [sic] to something being 'true' rationality, or, Freedom from contradiction or paradox is not a necessary an/or sufficient condition for 'truth': mathematics and science examples


The colin leslie dean theorem

"Examples from mathematics and science show the theorem: contradiction, or inconsistency within an explanation as well as mutual contradiction, or incommensurability [sic] between explanations does not preclude the explanation or both explanations from being 'true'" p 3
randy p says

It sounds like he doesn't know much about mathematics. Contradicting statements can not both be true.

but the fact is
calculaus was self contradictory -but it worked

p 10
“Newton and Leibniz developed the calculus…. Their ideas were attacked for being full of paradoxes.” Newton’s formulation of calculus was self-contradictory yet it worked. Newton worked with small increments going of to a zero limit. Berkeley showed that this leads to logical inconsistency. The main problem Bunch notes was “that a quantity was very close to zero, but not zero, during the first part of the operation then it became zero at the end.”
Up until then calculus was used pragmatically such that “instead of having demonstrations justify results, results were used to justify demonstrations.”

 

[(Ω)Mistress Bekki]

You have to love philosophers. They make outrageous thesis statements and then bury the meat of their arguments under pages of irrelevant philosophical background so that nobody can find the flaws.

Let me throw away the BS and summarize the relevant points

Fact 1) Newtonian calculus and mechanics originally had logical holes which were later corrected, and yet could be used to successfully compute many useful things.

Fact 2) Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in many ways which can't all be right. Yet all these interpretations are consistent with observational evidence.

The author's conclusion:
you don't have to be rational to be true.

When you break it down, the flaw in the argument is apparent. What those two facts actually show is (to use a colloquialism):
Even a blind sow can find a pearl from time to time.

Just because that blind sow (not a nice thing to call Newton, but I'll do it anyway) got the answers without dotting the i's and crossing the t's doesn't mean his work was sound. It was brilliant and historically important, but it was flawed until somebody fixed the errors. You could say the same thing about Feynman's method of QED which served to provide correct answers for a long time before the mathematicians were able to properly derive it.

The moral of the story is that physicists should not ultimately make claims of physical truth. We build models to predict our observations. When those models fail (and they eventually all seem to), they are replaced by more complete ones. The philosophical error that most of us make unconsciously is to assume that the models ARE the physical reality. We draw Feynman diagrams to calculate cross sections and then believe that because we got the right answers, those virtual particles in the diagrams are real rather than just a trick to find low-order perturbation solutions to the very difficult differential equations in QED. This is not unlike the problem of idolatry in religion--people will subconsciously tend to worship a representation of their god rather than the actual god.

 

[biire2u]

Mistress Bekki put it most eloquently and forthright.

I just wish to add my own simplified versions. Just because you have a theory of something doesn't mean the theory is correct. It might be supported for 99.9 % of the cases you test, but for that 0.1% left over, gives rise to the theory might lie in an entirely different direction.

Take Einstein and Relativity and the duality of light. Light supposedly shows properties of wave and particle both. This is irrational, in can't be both, but we have modeled around this contradiction so that it "works" in our equations. But we could be as wrong as the scientists of early days who truly believed "aether" was our atmosphere and the earth was the center of the universe.

Like wise for Einstein. His famous equation implies nothing can go faster than the speed of light. But several recent experiments have already shown their is a fallacy in this theory. Light might not have the upper limit of velocity that was first proposed. If this proves out, then our existing physics built on the foundation of a quantifiable light speed can be concluded to be based on a flawed theory.

It is this way for most theories. People except them as facts for some good , but as new knowledge becomes available, it sheds light on the theories and especially on the irrational parts that seem to coexist with most theories.

Use theories as a guide or a tool, to except them as the ultimate answer an no other explanation is just bad science in my opinion