> I think this is a very naive refutation of what the point was about Kuhn.

I don't deny that it's naive.

> First off, the notion that engineering "validates" science. What do you mean by validate? Do you mean successful engineering informed by a set of scientific principles, somehow, in a scientifically rigorous way, renders those principles true? As in, end of story true?

Nothing is end-of-story true except in mathematics, where we have access to absolute truth by virtue of first having accepted an axiom system as absolutely true within a context and then having accepted some logical rules as being capable of turning one absolute truth into another absolute truth within the same context.

Mathematics is absolute, but it's only valid within the abstract context of that branch of mathematics.

Physics, for example, is only conditionally true, contingent on us finding evidence which refutes a given theory, but it is applicable to the real world.

So engineering provides evidence that the theories we have can predict the behavior of the Universe at least in the context where they're being applied. A theory is only validated in the world in which it is tested. Granted. However, to the extent it is tested and validated, that validation should be accepted as worthwhile, as opposed to being written off as something culturally contingent.

> Because most of mechanical engineering is done on the assumption that force equals mass times acceleration. The industrial revolution yielded countless engineering marvels on the back of Newton--cars, trains, breathtaking buildings and bridges. But the theory isn't "true," because Albert Einstein did some thinking and realized that all of the physics change as you go really fast--something "engineering" missed, despite the fact that the stuff "worked."

Right, and Einstein's predictions about how the acceleration of a massive particle to near light speed would affect its measurement of time were not validated by engineering but experimentation. And it's also true that bridge engineering validates Newton as much as it does Einstein and Dirac, for example, because it operates in a world where all three theories are "valid" in the sense of "if you use them to help make your bridge, they will not cause it to fall down", and it validates whatever ideas the ancient Roman bridge-builders had, at least if the bridge is of a style the Romans made. I grant all of that.

Philosophically, then, we're back to Popper, in that negative results push science forwards, whereas positive results only make us more sure that the ground we're standing on is solid. We shouldn't ignore positive results, though, because the bridge will still stand even after the next paradigm shift; we should further accept all theories as provisionally correct. That much seems fairly mainstream, philosophically speaking.

However, we are moving forwards. We are able to explain more observations than we have been able to in the past. We are not just moving in circles, with each paradigm shift undoing all of our work and sending us back to square one. We learn to make better and better bridges, to bring this back to engineering.

> But somehow it feels wrong to say that Newton was wrong, right? Because in his world, with the kind of thinking and set of scientific instruments available to him, and the battled hardened inverse square phenomena [1] that could be painstakingly measured and applied in engineering, it was infallible. It was true. But only in historical context.

Newton's laws were always provisional. We now know them to be incomplete, but still useful for human-scale construction, on Earth or in space or on other bodies entirely. They've been subsumed into more modern theories as a special case; they're the equations you observe when you set the paramters to be similar to what humans will experience first-hand. And, as you said, they couldn't explain Mercury, which modern theories can, so they were incomplete even before we had GPS satellites to falsify their predictions. (I mean, they were observably incomplete. Our observation doesn't dictate what reality is; any solipsists can kindly imagine that I don't exist and refrain from communicating with me.)

So engineering does validate theories, but validation isn't enough to winnow theories until you come up with some test some of them fail. That's just Popperian philosophy, though, isn't it? That's just the philosophy of science that all the cool kids are so done with right now, right? My point is that we shouldn't imagine that the validation is worthless, or imagine that it can be undone, because any new theory will have to explain precisely the same behavior as the old one, paradigm shift or no.