Inadequacies in World Hypotheses

In World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942), Chapter VI: Inadequacies in World Hypotheses, the focus is back on Scope and Precision, towards developing an Adequate World Hypothesis.

Following the chapter on Root Metaphor Method, the maxims, in effect, say that we can't use one world hypothesis to criticize another.

> ยง 1. _Tests of adequacy_. > ... maxims do not, however, indicate how we may judge the relative adequacies of different pure root-metaphor theories. [p. 115]

A world hypothesis that is in state of development may just not have reached a level of adequacy.

> A theory so judged to be relatively inadequate may not as yet have reached its full capacities of development. Nevertheless, a detailed study of a theory that has been long worked over generally leaves one pretty well convinced that it has done all that its categories can do, and that the inadequacies of which it convicts itself are permanent inadequacies. [p. 116]

> A world hypothesis may, therefore, be inadequate in precision or in scope. > It may, that is, on the one hand have world-wide scope but lack precision, this lack of precision showing itself either > * in an inability to come to close quarters with a fact (that is, cognitive vagueness), or > * in an overability to produce interpretations of a fact any one of which would be as consistent with the categories as any other (that is, cognitive indeterminateness); > or, on the other hand, a world hypothesis may have apparent precision in the interpretation of many fields of fact, but lack world-wide scope > * through its inability to offer any interpretation of some field or fields. > The typical ruse in this latter case is to call the recalcitrant fields "unreality." It follows that whenever a world hypothesis makes an appeal to "unreality" (especially as an explanatory or interpretative principle), it unwittingly convicts itself of inadequacy, and the more definitely it locates its fields of "unreality" the more definitely it shows just where it falls short of world-wide scope and factual corroboration. [p. 118, editorial paragraphing added]