Paragraph about Scientific software
Is it plausible to regard the text that contains all of the full details of causal and nomological information relevant to some outcome as at least an “ideal” against Scientific software which various candidate explanations of that outcome are to be judged? Suppose we are presented with an explanation from economics or psychology that does not appeal to any generalization that we are prepared to count as a law but that underlying this “non-ideal” explanation is some incredibly complex set of facts described in terms of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, mathlab along with the relevant laws of these theories. If, as almost certainly will be the case, this underlying “explanation” is computationally intractable, and full of irrelevant detail (see section 4 below for more on what this might mean), one might wonder in what sense it is an ideal against which the original explanation should be measured. Will the economics explanation really be better according as to whether it conveys as much information as possible about these underlying details?
Contents
Math software
Scientific workplace