MOND and Methodology

TL;DR

This paper compares MOND and standard cosmology through the lens of Popper's scientific methodology, highlighting that MOND's predictive success contrasts with the post-hoc adjustments of standard models, complicating direct comparisons of their truthlikeness.

Contribution

It analyzes the methodological differences between MOND and standard cosmology, proposing that these differences affect their scientific progress and comparability.

Findings

MOND has made successful novel predictions.

Standard cosmology often adjusts theories post-hoc.

Methodological differences impact theories' progress toward truth.

Abstract

In Logik der Forschung and later works, Karl Popper proposed a set of methodological rules for scientists. Among these were requirements that theories evolve in the direction of increasing content, and that new theories should only be accepted if some of their novel predictions are experimentally confirmed. There are currently two, viable theories of cosmology: the standard cosmological model, and a theory due to Mordehai Milgrom called MOND. Both theories can point to successes and failures, but only MOND has repeatedly made novel predictions that were subsequently found to be correct. Standard-model cosmologists, by contrast, have almost always responded to new observations in a post-hoc manner, adjusting or augmenting their theory as needed to obtain correspondence with the facts. I argue that these methodological differences render a comparison of the two theories in terms of their "truthlikeness" or "verisimilitude" essentially impossible since the two groups of scientists achieve correspondence with the facts in often very different ways, and I suggest that a better guide to the theories' progress toward truth might be the methodologies themselves.