My mother thinks the earth is flat. Please help me Veeky Forums!

Ask her to explain gravity. If she happens to say the earth accelerates upwards at g, show that this would reach the speed of light in a year

Ask how the sun goes below the horizon

Bonus: ask how the lengths of days are different near the north pole

Go to the edge of the earth with your mom and kick her off it. Oh wait, there is no edge.

She said that air is heavier than everything and it keeps us down...

...

ask her what holds the air down

The air is roughly one atmosphere heavy. It's pretty big.

She says "it's the firmament holding us down".
Just fuck my family up.

Well, if there is a dome over us then you could argue air pressure pushes us down

There's your solution, OP: Never let your mother live on one of our terraformed exoplanet colonies.

Problem solved.

She just sent me this pic.

Can i disown my own mother?

Tell her to watch a sunset on the beach, and once the sun sets walk up a hill and watch the sunset again

If she has internet then you're already doomed. It's the mother of all selection bias.

Yes, it's called emancipation of minors.

no you couldn't retard, the air is still fucking lighter than us

Thanks.

>lighter
That logic only applies when you bother believing in gravity. This is about what you can argue, not about the truth.
NP. It's one of the top five things the world was supposed to tell me about by age 15, but didn't.

If gravity exists then none of this applies anyway

well yeah but if she doesn't believe in gravity then the weight of the air wouldn't matter

why would anything need to hold the air down? It's the air that hold the earth up.

Hence air pressure

but higher pressure doesn't mean we'll stay stuck to the ground, unless it's so thick it matches our density, but then we couldn't move

No one is saying its not a retarded argument

there's not always a signal. But the sunrises are amazing
ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream

(ME)
next one in about 30 mins

>ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
Obviously its faked, the loss of signal is when nasa's cgi department is playing cacth up

show her a spaceX stream, you can see their rockets going up and earth becoming round, if she says it's fake and Elon Musk is a scam you're helpless, she just got 100% into conspiracy bullshit.

What about this video of a rocket hitting the dome?

youtube.com/watch?v=IAcp3BFBYw4

The context of justification/context of discovery distinction, just like "relativized a priori", was coined by Reichenbach, a founding father of logical positivism credited for absorbing neo-Kantianism into it. It was one of the four "dogmas of empiricism" shared by positivists and Popper, along with the analytic/synthetic and theory/observation distinctions, and the demarcation of science and non-science. By the time of Feyerabend Quine already put the first two under severe stress, and without neutrally expressed observations the attention turned to the basis of justification. How and when it is implemented in science, who is doing it, and by what standard. Positivists and Popper had a neat answer: they, i.e. philosophy, will stand in judgement of sciences by applying a priori methodological principles (although they disagreed on verificationism vs. falsificationism). That is the division of labor between scientists and philosophers.

But scientists did not tend to submit themselves to the judgements of philosophers, so the simpler point of Feyerabend's historical excursions was that if those methodological principles were at work in actual science we'll uncover them there. But what he uncovered instead was that seemingly anything works in science. That is the minor premise. And Quine already supplied the major premise, whatever works - goes. Indeed, "the unit of justification is the whole of science" with all its methodological principles, subject to the "tribunal of experience", which judges only if science works empirically. Since anything works - anything goes, the motto of epistemological anarchism.

However, Feyerabend also had a deeper point on norms and standards: how are we to judge what works? Late Wittgenstein already argued that meaning is use, and Quine concurred. But when discoveries are made and new theories emerge, the use of science changes, and with it "meanings" and "observations". Hence Feyerabend's notion of "meaning variance".

What standard of justification can possibly stand over and above theories, say new and old, that are using different languages, play different language games? None, concluded Feyerabend. It was from him that Kuhn absorbed the notion of "incommensurability", when they both worked in Berkeley in 1962 and he was finishing Scientific Revolutions (although his was more moderate than Feyerabend's, which got largely overlooked in the subsequent controversy). It was left to Kuhn, who also worked with Quine directly at Stanford in 1958-59, and credited him as major influence, to neatly package everything into paradigms that come with their own observations, language and standards of research, and transform the question of justification into the question of acceptance, which is open to pragmatic, cultural, sociological, etc., influences. And there went the demarcation. See Zammito's insightful historical/philosophical account in Ch.4 of The Nice Derangement of Epistemes.

It is easy to see today that Feyerabend, and to a lesser extent Quine and Kuhn, overdid it, but at least part of the blame should also be laid at the feet of Popper and Reichenbach, who did half of Feyerabend's work for him. It is they who consigned most of scientific process to "discovery", and then cast it aside as irrational and philosophically irrelevant, "conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it... there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process" wrote Popper. It is they who masterminded the conceit of (their) philosophy standing in judgement of science based on forever principles. But when that bluff was called the pendulum has swung the other way too far. See Hanson's Is There a Logic of Scientific Discovery?

rockets doesn't go up that fast, this video was sped up and in the end slowed down, it didn't hit anything (if it did at that speed, it would have exploded.

Anyways if she still doesn't believe you, just give up on her, she just can't basic physics.