(July 26, 2023 at 4:10 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(July 26, 2023 at 3:33 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: I don't think I am being "dogmatic". I don't think Semmelweis was being dogmatic when he refused to listen to the Levy's suggestion "Why not perform a simpler and more convincing experiment, to simply stop all the autopsies?". In fact, I don't think Levy could be described as "dogmatic" either, I think Levy was a positivist, and positivism rejects seemingly-magical explanations (such as the Semmelweis'es theory of cadaverous particles in blood causing death). If anybody, Benjamin Rush was being dogmatic.
This may come as both a shock and a disappointment to you, but you’re not Semmelweis.
Boru
Well, both Semmelweis and I tried to apply statistics where it is usually not applied. Semmelweis tried to apply statistics to medicine, whereas I tried to apply statistics to the names of places. And both of us ran into a bunch of ridiculous objections.
To be fair, most historians of science think that the primary reason Semmelweis'es findings were rejected was because he could not provide a plausible theoretical explanation for his findings, which I don't think is going on here. I see no reason why my explanation that *karr~kurr was the Illyrian word for "to flow" (that the name Karašica comes from unattested Illyrian name *Kurrurrissia or *Kurrirrissia, that the name Krapina comes from *Karpona or, less likely, from something like *Kurrippuppona, and so on) would sound extremely implausible.