This is a somewhat uncomfortable thread to be writing. It's began with a throwaway joke from my point of view. I don't regard my own point of view above as especially serious or well-founded. It's just how I arrived at my priors, and may be wrong.
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chain of reasoning that led to GR. Not difficult to think of other examples like this in other parts of science. (One I perpetually find amusing is energy conservation. It keeps being true, despite the fact that the meaning of "energy" changes radically from theory to theory!)
All by way of saying that I tend to think of explanation-evaluation as something that can only be done after the fact, since good explanations often create much of the conceptual ground we need to say they are good. (Darwin is another great example!)
