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Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn, as in my example of "oomph," then the proposition they state is almost meaningless, because you can explain almost anything by the assertion that things have a tendency to motility. A great deal has been made of this by philosophers, who say that words must be defined extremely precisely. Actually, I disagree somewhat with this; I think that extreme precision of definition is often not worthwhile, and sometimes it is not possible—in fact mostly it is not possible, but I will not get into that argument here.
Most of what many philosophers say about science is really on the technical aspects involved in trying to make sure the method works pretty well. Whether these technical points would be useful in a field in which observation is not the judge I have no idea. I am not going to say that everything has to be done the same way when a method of testing different from observation is used. In a different field perhaps it is not so important to be careful of the meaning of words or that the rules be specific, and so on. I do not know.
In all of this I have left out something very important. I said that observation is the judge of the truth of an idea. But where does the idea come from? The rapid progress and development of science requires that human beings invent something to test.
It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws
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