> When I read it I heard the process of elimination that scientists went through ruling out all of the ways it could not have happened, leaving only this explanation which fit the facts.
I share the affront, based largely on this very idea.
You're using Sherlock Holmes' catchphrase: "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". It's fun fiction, but it's terrible science; you're never going to be able to distinguish between the improbable and the impossible to the degree required, and more importantly, you'll never even be able to enumerate, much less eliminate, every theoretical possibility.
This is the fallacy of accepting the alternative: You conjecture that cold temperatures are caused by the god of the winter wind blowing on the earth. You do a careful statistical analysis demonstrating that it is unlikely that day-to-day temperatures are determined by chance variation (for example, December days are overwhelmingly and predictably colder than July days). So you "logically" accept that you've supported the god-of-the-winter-winds theory. You haven't; rejecting one hypothesis is not evidence in support of any particular other hypothesis.
Thank you for this response. I am really interested in your first sentence.
As I understand your response, I paraphrased a description of the scientific method and you were affronted by it. Is it science in general?
Your last paragraph was especially illustrative for me, while I am not familiar with a "fallacy of accepting the alternative" as I read it, your statement "rejecting one hypothesis is not evidence in support of any particular other hypothesis" does not explain to me the evidence you used to reject one hypothesis over another.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it reads like you feel that any hypothesis would be acceptable as an alternate. However that is not true, either in science or in Sherlock Holmes novels. As you probably know, in a Sherlock Holmes story at the end is the big reveal in which all of the facts are put together by the detective so that all of them can be true at the same time. Sometimes he does this by finding an additional clue which binds together two seemingly unrelated bits of evidence. But the great detective would not entertain a theory that the "Easter Bunny did it" in the absence of any possibility that the Easter Bunny could have done it.
In order for an alternative hypothesis to be considered valid by a scientist, it must first explain every fact that we already know to be true. Further, if the alternate needs an entirely new thing that hasn't been discussed before (your "God of Winter" for example), then it also has to have the evidence that was used to establish that new thing. As a scientist you have to accept that your hypothesis and your new thing will be challenged until nobody can find a single fact that would have to be different or a way in which your evidence can not be verified or reproduced. Of course during that process of challenging a lay person might hear one scientist who supports on hypothesis and one who supports a different hypothesis.
But would this be offensive to you? And if so what generates the offense? The lack of an answer or the multitude of answers?
I share the affront, based largely on this very idea.
You're using Sherlock Holmes' catchphrase: "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". It's fun fiction, but it's terrible science; you're never going to be able to distinguish between the improbable and the impossible to the degree required, and more importantly, you'll never even be able to enumerate, much less eliminate, every theoretical possibility.
This is the fallacy of accepting the alternative: You conjecture that cold temperatures are caused by the god of the winter wind blowing on the earth. You do a careful statistical analysis demonstrating that it is unlikely that day-to-day temperatures are determined by chance variation (for example, December days are overwhelmingly and predictably colder than July days). So you "logically" accept that you've supported the god-of-the-winter-winds theory. You haven't; rejecting one hypothesis is not evidence in support of any particular other hypothesis.