phlogiston

Oh no, it was science that discarded phlogiston?

You criticism is valid but the work being done in the area is certainly not of the phlogiston type.

We now know that combustion is caused by high temperature and a mixture of fuel and oxidizer, and there is no phlogiston.

I would not be surprised if it turns out that the Copenhagen interpretation is a modern phlogiston theory.

Metals that gained weight through oxidation were simply losing "negative phlogiston".

How can a philosophical position be refuted and discredited in the way phlogiston has been?

I understand that phlogiston thrived until real honest scientific experiments disproved it.

It's very satisfying to say "ya but people used to think fire was made of phlogiston," but I claim that are scientific knowledge is of a fundamental different quality than previous.

That's why I wrote that a new theory can "refine the modelling of reality".Whatever good predictions the phlogiston theory and whatever phenomena they explained didn't stop working the moment we switched to a next theory.

" It may turn out that a future science will come up with a very satisfying answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I suspect that this will require a paradigm shift so radical that it will make current neuroscience look like phlogiston theory.

Phlogiston theory never "worked," as demonstrated by the Wikipedia article you linked.> Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals, such as magnesium, gained mass when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston.