Connectionists: Brain-like computing fanfare and big data fanfare

[John Collins]

On 01/27/2014 02:51 PM, Marcello Pelillo wrote:
>
> The "philosophical" grounds for this apparently irrational behavior
> (sorry, back to philosophy...) can be found in the well-known
> Duhen-Quine thesis:
>
> "In sum, the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to
> experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the
> experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is
> that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is
> unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not
> designate which one should be changed."
>
> P. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 1914.

That's not the whole story.  For modern physics, a common happening is 
that when theory and experiment disagree, it is the experiment that is 
wrong, at least if the theory is well established.  (Faster-than-light 
neutrinos are only one example.)

John Collins