“Whatever the ultimate decision,” he says on the NASW-Talk list, “it will
be a decision, not a fact and not a theory.” In other words, there is no experiment that could be carried out to test this, no observations need be made, and there will be no scientific paradigm shift whatever the final outcome of the ongoing meeting, only effectively another (political) decision regarding our place in the universe, or the solar system, at least.

Bolles adds that, “Back in the time of Copernicus saying the sun was not a planet, was a big deal, as was the claim that the earth was one.” The current argument is probably not quite so important, but it does hint that much of scientific thought is based on taxonomy and language, says Bolles, rather than the testing of theories with scientific experiments.

I assume you mean Neptune rather than Uranus.