Sentence examples similar to counter instance from inspiring English sources

I don't think it's vindictive to point out that a man would never say such a supercilious thing, and I don't think it's excessive to conclude that, for every instance in which women's rights are better served by a woman, there is a counter-instance in which they are better served by a man.

Observation counts against a theoretical claim if the conjunction entails a counter-instance.

The only counter-instance to this rule is prior absence, which has occasional existence but being beginningless has no cause.

It would not be acceptable if the only evidence for the existence of the disturbing factor were the counter-instance we started with.

Richard Swinburne (1970) has suggested that a miracle might be defined as a non-repeatable counter-instance to a law of nature.

Every genuine test of a scientific theory, then, is logically an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-instance falsifies the whole theory.

Both of these theories spring from purely logical roots, confirmationism from Carnap's work on inductive logic, and falsificationism from Popper's rejection of inductive logic coupled with his assertion that universals can be falsified by a single counter-instance.

Yet, if one supposes that the law is to be formalized as a universally quantified conditional sentence, then one counter-instance (due to a disturbing factor) to the universally quantified sentence means that it is false.

In a critical sense, Popper's theory of demarcation is based upon his perception of the logical asymmetry which holds between verification and falsification: it is logically impossible to conclusively verify a universal proposition by reference to experience (as Hume saw clearly), but a single counter-instance conclusively falsifies the corresponding universal law.

Because of this fact Fodor's and related accounts face severe problems, as will be demonstrated in section 5.2.[11] For the cp-law to be acceptable in spite of the counter-instance we need independent evidence for the existence of the disturbing factor.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them.