Bacon proposes that if we take explanatory power to be our guide, then empirical testing will ultimately single out the truth. The Tychonic principle says that much of that testing will be extraordinarily difficult to conduct. It is for this reason that the iron rule is essential to modern science’s success. The effort required to build a store of observable fact sufficient for Baconian convergence in a Tychonic world is so great that humans can be persuaded, induced, or impelled to take on the project only under exceptional circumstances. The iron rule engineers those circumstances and so
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