I agree it's not a complex theory, but it is a theory that explains why we see mostly white swans in the world, just as the theory that ohm's law describes electrical quantities in a circuit explains why our measurements are what they are. A theory need not be complex to be explanatory. If you ask me why you got a green M&M I might explain that the bag contains only green M&Ms, or they stopped selling other kinds of M&Ms, or that all M&Ms are green. All three theories predict certain observations and explain why those observations occur.
Anyway, this is all beside the point. If I had a theory that the genetic material in a swan leads to the production of baby swans that are blue, and therefore all swans are blue, then you might point out that you've seen a white swan. At which point I might simply disregard it as an anomaly or incomplete branch of my blue swan theory, suggesting that the observation is defective in some way, or perhaps that blue swans appear white under certain conditions in spite of their being blue. After more white swans are observed, I might adjust the surrounding background knowledge by defining the reflection of all light waves equally as a form of blueness. Then someone will come along with an observation of a black swan and we'd do the dance all over again. The point being that some adjustments of surrounding background knowledge would be so dramatic as to qualify for an entirely new conception of the world. That there's no line or criteria you can posit to determine when this occurs seems as much a function of the vagueness of any theory, an implicit consequence of the underdetermination of theory, as it is of there being a similarity between intra-theoretic changes and inter-theoretic changes.
Anyway, this is all beside the point. If I had a theory that the genetic material in a swan leads to the production of baby swans that are blue, and therefore all swans are blue, then you might point out that you've seen a white swan. At which point I might simply disregard it as an anomaly or incomplete branch of my blue swan theory, suggesting that the observation is defective in some way, or perhaps that blue swans appear white under certain conditions in spite of their being blue. After more white swans are observed, I might adjust the surrounding background knowledge by defining the reflection of all light waves equally as a form of blueness. Then someone will come along with an observation of a black swan and we'd do the dance all over again. The point being that some adjustments of surrounding background knowledge would be so dramatic as to qualify for an entirely new conception of the world. That there's no line or criteria you can posit to determine when this occurs seems as much a function of the vagueness of any theory, an implicit consequence of the underdetermination of theory, as it is of there being a similarity between intra-theoretic changes and inter-theoretic changes.
![[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/zf86M5L7/extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg)
