Names of places in Croatia

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

No. An ad hoc hypothesis is inventing reasons to render an hypothesis unfalsifiable. Like this:

Hypothesis: Bigfoot exist.

Criticism: Show me one.

Ad hoc #1: Can’t - they can render themselves invisible.

Criticism: Well, then show me evidence - fur, scat, bones.

Ad hoc #2: No can do - Bigfoot are transdimensional beings and are able to make their evidence undetectable to humans.

Criticism: Photographs, videos, audio recordings?

Ad hoc #3: Those are all government fakes to hide the truth.

And so on. Ad hocs are meant support an hypothesis, not disprove it.

Boru

I think it is essentially the same thing. The mainstream linguistics considers the river names that start with k-r (Krka, Korana, Kravarščica, Krapina, Krbavica, Kravica, two rivers named Karašica) to be unrelated, that this k-r pattern is accidental. My paper says: "That would imply that there is a significant probability of that k-r pattern occurring by chance. There isn't. Here is a simple experiment that shows that probability has to be somewhere between 1/300 and 1/17...". Neuralbeans says, in response to that, "Maybe that experiment is flawed because the collision entropy of the nouns is significantly lower than the collision entropy of all the words in the Croatian language.". Neuralbeans is essentially modifying mainstream linguistics to make it harder to falsify it. Measuring the collision entropy of only the nouns is a lot harder than simply measuring the collision entropy of all words in Aspell word-list.

It is NOT the same thing, not remotely. What is happening to you is that people are critiquing aspects of your paper and making suggestions. This is essentially an informal sort of peer review and is vital to scientific discourse.

Ad hoc would be if YOU kept adding new bits to your own theory every time it faced a criticism (to your credit, you haven’t done this).

Boru