>Theory has a different meaning in science than it does in every day usage.
What are some of your favorite brainlet-tier quotes? This one always fucks me up because both your average Joe and your Ivy League professor are using theory to mean speculation based upon the available evidence. The difference is the amount of available evidence each has at their disposal, not the meaning of the word.
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"Just a theory" doesn't work because there exists no possible higher standard, apart from proofs in constructed systems. It's an empty criticism, and the distinction is disregarded in everyday usage.
>Theory has a different meaning in science than it does in every day usage.
It does have a different meaning in math though.
Doesn't math use theory to mean proof, though? I've never seen a mathematical theorem included in a textbook that didn't have an associated proof.
So is it only called a theory because it's not necessarily true (only true if you accept some basic, mathematical, assumptions) or what's the story here?
>But you can't disprove...
conspiracy theory
prove me wrong
I guess to be precise, I should have said that the meaning of theory is different in "metamathematics", which is very roughly the theory of how mathematical theories are formulated. So instead of using theories to prove stuff, theories (or more precisely, models) themselves become the objects of study and are described by listing their various properties.
This is no different from how group theory, set theory, the theory of metric spaces etc. study their respective objects. Instead of a set being "a collection of other objects" it is now "anything that satisfies the set-theory axioms", instead of a metric space being "a set of points equipped with some notion of distance" it is generalized to "anything that satisfies the metric-space axioms".
In our case, a model is no longer "a way of proving the truth of propositions" it is now "anything that satisfies the model-theory axioms", and likewise a "theory" goes from "a collection of sentences that we take to be true" to "a collection of sentences, period". This definition is useful because we often want to study the behavior of models that behave logically but end up proving theories that 'turn out to be false' (i.e., the models 'began with false premises').
There's a bit of handwaving here, but the main point is that our notion of a theory as an arbitrary set of sentences is no stranger than a distance function sending a pair of points to a non-negative real number, or a group homomorphism as a method for converting addition to multiplication. Encountering bizarre definitions is part and parcel of abstraction.
>both your average Joe and your Ivy League professor are using theory to mean speculation based upon the available evidence
Incorrect.
Your average Joe tends to use 'theory' as just a thought, an idea.
Fuck, why do you think people make the distinction about the word so often? Why people say "lol evolution is just a theory"? It's because there IS a fucking difference.
>Just a thought or idea
Based on what?
Spoiler: The available evidence.
Based on fucking nothing.
Never noticed how people say shit like "Here's just a theory, what if..."
Do you ever even go outside and talk with people? This is basic human interaction & language
So you think the average person uses the word theory to say something just completely incoherent? Because when I hear people say "I have a theory," usually something reasonably intelligible comes out of their mouth. At the very least they're not just stringing words together at random.
> E.g. I have a theory that aliens abduct people and do experiments on them.
> Life exists on Earth
> Given an infinitely large universe aliens are bound to exist
> Humans "abduct" other species and experiment on them to see how they work
> Other sentient life forms probably behave in a similar manner to humans
> Therefore if aliens came into contact with humans they would likely abduct and experiment on Earth
> Look at these crop circles, clearly aliens have come in contact with humans, ipso facto.
The qualm is with the quality of the evidence, and/or the soundness of the logical reasoning process. They still have a theory, which is based on a logic and has evidence to support it, regardless of how shoddy the logic/evidence is.
>prove me wrong
I understand your annoyance with the passive-aggressive way this is used, but in fact proving wrong hypotheses wrong is how science progresses.
>backpeddling so hard that evidence suddenly isn't necessary anymore, just some half-baked reasoning
Yeah, let's just forget about evidence. "Dude cropcircles lmao" should be enough.
A scientific theory is a model that explains the facts as we know them and predicts future phenomena.
The layman's use of the word 'theory' is 'something intelligible', by your own words. They string together some bullshit to support it but ultimately never actually have anything to back it up with.
Can you really not tell the difference between your very own example and fucking gravity?
I think a theory is based on results, not speculation. The difference in your example is that you can't replicate the experiment because there is none, just a logical argument. There's a reason math deals with theorems and not theories.
what about conspiracy theorems? those are shown to be true under their conspiratory postulates
one of my favourite things to do is say "evolution is just a theory" and watch everyone get all mad and rush to explain what "theory" means because they assume I'm trying to imply that evolution isn't real.
Evolution really is "just a theory". That's all it is.
eh, natural selection is a theory
evolution (the idea that organisms have changed and do change through history) is as close to fact as it gets, on par with "near the surface of the earth, shit falls down"
>"near the surface of the earth, shit falls down"
you're referring to the theory of gravitation which as the name would suggest is also a theory.
>the theory of gravitation
which is the idea that every object is attracted to every other object by a force proportional to the product of the masses of the two objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, as formulated by Newton (and later supplanted by Einstein and others)
"shit falls down" is a much more basic observation.
>implying the earth is a spheroid
earth is a rhombus pls respond
en.wikipedia.org
>Although referred to as a theorem, the Vogt–Russell theorem has never been formally proved
That's the way the world works user
>I'm a theoretical theorist. I study theory theory.
Theory, theorem and proof are three different things. Theorem is a claim of the form "if the assumptions hold then the claim holds", and this is followed by a proof, a deduction beginning with the assumptions and ending with the claim of the theorem. This deduction is called a "proof" because, by soundness, you can not (logically) deduce something that is not true, that is, if a proof for a theorem exists then that theorem is true.
A theory is defined like this and shouldn't be confused with theorems.