These objections were not only adressed by popper in his first book, they were addressed after being put in the strongest form popper could come up with and people still think that the weaker objections to his arguments suffice.
Yep, what did he say, how did he say it? I can't remember what he said. But I disagree. We're both unreliable here. If anyone can help, then please do.
Popper would not say that if they are doing induction they are not doing science, because induction is impossible, that is his stance. Popper admits that if they are doing induction then they would be doing science, but the fact tha they are doing science does not mean they are doing induction.
Popper went further and solved the biggest problem in philosophy, the epistemological problem, "how does knowledge grow?" His answer was "by trial and error elimination" or more simply "by trial and error".Knowledge doesn't grow from observation or even the "search-light theory" (that you first have a guess/theory/hypothesis/opinion). Knowledge growth start with having a problem and then you follow P1-TS-EE-P2, repeat.You have a problem P1, you try to solve it with a tentative solution TS, you then test your trial solution with error elimination and on the way you get a better understanding of the problem and the weakness of your TS1. Eventually you get to TSn and it passes EEn and you publish for peer review. A starter problem would, for example, be "how to cure Ebola?".Popper also makes the distinction between two logical critical rationalist undertakings; maths and science. In science we can only ever achieve a high degree of truth-likeness but we can never prove a theory. Yet in the parallel cosmological activity of maths we can prove our theories. Most epistemology forgets about maths or thinks it is science and not a parallel cosmological activity.When a scientific theory has passed peer review and independent critical examination and achieved a high degree of truth-likeness we can proclaim that it is more than mere opinion or belief but OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE or what Popper called World 3 where world I was matter and world 2 mind.This begs the question "what is World 4, 5 n?" And the TS1 should be technology is World 4 and it is much bigger than World 3 as it makes a much bigger impact on man's health, wealth and happiness.Please comment.
Re: LSD and DNA. It seems Watson would do anything to avoid giving Rosalind Franklin credit for the crystallography and photography that led Watson and Crick to their understanding of the structure of DNA. In 1953 there certainly was not much LSD around so I don’t know if his much later revelations were true or false. However, Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner admitted to using LSD while coming up with the PCR technique for deconstructing DNA base by base.
First of all - wonderful stuff. I would never read all that material. I also must say I hate these jumps of logic of those men in science. Everyone works from assumptions and uncovering these assumptions is research (call it science if you wish). This is my female definition. Short and sweet.
definitely enjoying this series immensely! Can't wait to see more. Are lectures 1 through 4 uploaded also? Would love to see a playlist of them but im just being selfish :P regardless thank you lots! My time is very constraint, so being able to at least gain insight on all these things in an efficient manner is wonderful to me.
5:55 I don’t think Popper would think of a theory as being more likely to be true the more attempts to falsify it fail. That would be an inductivist mistake. If I remember correctly, he doesn’t make claims about the likelihood of any scientific theory. If we haven’t disproven it yet, maybe we are correct; but we are not more likely to be correct if we keep failing to falsify it. To his credit, he does revisit and correct this later in the video.
I just wanted to say that, once again, and as always, I thoroughly enjoyed watching your lectures. I look forward to new posts from you all the time, and I watch/listen to them over and over. Please keep them coming, you are, in my opinion, the best in your field that I can find on RU-vid. Thank you for doing what you do. Also, will you be doing anymore "Badasses"?
Yes, I have the next BitHoS scripted, I just haven't had the time to make the video. Those are very time consuming, and I want to do them right. Thanks for your words of praise. I really appreciate the positive feedback.
Well I hope what I've already said about Quine (i.e. holism about testing) in the previous lecture, Popper in this one, and what I will say about Kuhn in the next two will make the case, indirectly at least.
The point about anomalies does not arise, because any outcome of a test is an anomalie and you should treat it as such until there is a reason (namely a rational theory of why it is not an anomalie coupled with the fact that the new theory should explain akk the other data that your old theory explained, and which makes testable predictions beyond the potential anomalie) to treat it otherwise. When this happens then you have a genuine case of falsification.
As a working scientist, when I see data associated with a a problem on which I'm working, I try to come up with an explanation. Then I test the explanation. If science is not inductive, then what the heck was I doing between the time I saw the data and when I tested my explanation?
#7:50 Science and scientific theory (tries) to EXPLAIN things (hypothesis). The astrological predictions do not. If any at all, the theory that EXPLAINS why planets and constellations influence humans (and how), should be falsifiable. (2) Science is about objects and their relations (concepts).
Excellent lecture series, thoroughly enjoying it, I did Philosophy at Uni but gave the Philosophy of Science unit a miss as I thought it would be boring, especially when there were units with much bling such as Sartre, Baudrillard and the Frankfurt School out there, thanks for filling a gap in my education.
The example asking if a coin is fair regarding falsifiability is not a question that falsifiability is supposed to be able to answer. Math is not part of science. Falsifiability may be able to answer this specific question if the right information was available, things that seem impossible to right now due to chaos theory.
Plugging rough guesstimates for the probabilities into Bayes' theorem will immediately show why the above experiment is uninteresting. It tells us nothing new about the world. This is why Popper also emphasizes the boldness of prediction because making highly specific predictions that are highly unintuitive, yet bear out in practice, leads to huge increases in Bayesian confidence.
Demarcation is a small contribution of Popper’s epistemology. What about the sources of knowledge, the needless (inexistent) foundations of knowledge, the love affair with problems, the truth content of theories, the problems a theory solves and how it gives rise to new problems, the need for a rival theory in order to make meaningful any experiment, objective progress, the myth of the framework, the paradox of tolerance, etc.?!
'If the situation changes' is one scenario that would make sense, but what I'm imagining is the idea that we've been wrong all along. THAT is what seems impossible, given the fact that we have direct measurement of the suns' size. To have been wrong all along would be like being wrong about the fact that we have hands; it would require some kind of massive group hallucination of some kind. That seems to be seriously stretching the idea of what it means to be falsifiable.
Good presentation. I see the young Darwin getting into his carriage for a trip to the Beagle and an Earth-shattering voyage. In his mind, I believe he had enough to infer evolution. Erasmus Darwin's presence must have inspired Charles to seek more evidence than indicated by his pigeons.
I very like that idea that ''scientific'' is more of a quality or spectrum than a demarcation. It corresponds very well with the certitude of a claim and with the problem of '' more likelyness''. Like in thermodynamics, there is a non-zero probability that all the air in a room condenses in a corner, but for practical reasons we say it won't. And that's where the notion of entropy comes in.
My primary source is Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Theory and Reality". That's the text I use for my class. But several of the criticisms in this video specifically came from Elliot Sober's book "Philosophy of Biology". Hope that helps.
It's not that the hypothesis that you have two hands isn't falsifiable. It clearly is. We can count them and it's possible that we come up with all kinds of numbers. That's a method and criteria for falsification right there. The problem with the hypothesis is just that it isn't very interesting because the result is known to a very high degree of certainty before we do the experiment.
I love this lectures!! I disagree with the criticism of Popper, that if the union of astrology decided to adopt his criterion, they would turn scientific by his standard, even though astrology would still make false claims. In the unlikely case that astrologists started to make theories which could be falsified, and tested them, they would eventually abandon (almost?) all the claims that astrology presently does. They would turn astrology into a legitimate science that has nothing to do with what we nowadays call astrology, or declare bankrupt.
yes, under Popper's definition there is still /bad/ science. /bad/ science or /wrong/ science isn't demarcated. The point is that it doesn't become phenomenological either, not pseudo science unless it refused to accept falsification or claimed to be science before creating these criterion.
I have always been impressed by Newton's statement that "we stand on the shoulders of giants and see further". This was absolutely not in Newton's character as he had no modesty and some say it was yet another attack on his rival Hook who was short.Both Newton and Hook gave us towering new knowledge but where is the new philosophical knowledge post Popper. Yes philosophy was known as natural science and today most of its previous content belongs to hundreds of scientific disciplines. It was OK for Berkeley to write about sight but not for Russell as sight had left philosophy and become a scientific discipline.I have only ever recognised two problems in philosophy; facts and values, epistemology and ethics. The two are totally separated by Hume's guillotine; laws of nature are fixed whilst our social laws are of our choice. Popper actually solved both.This is philosophy. Philosophy does big. There have only been teachers of philosophy post Popper. None have stood on the shoulders of Popper wrt epistemology or Kant wrt ethics. Michael Sander with his GHP v categorical imperative is dated. Post Popper is the search for World 4 and post Kant is parliamentary democracy.Please comment.
A few things, starting with the most unimportant. Imo, I'd use the word "knowledge" instead of believe here, mostly because Plato doesn't say beliefs can't be unjustified, but only knowledge must be justified. Do you think I'm wrong here? Second, and I'm sorry if I'm being a little nitpicky, but when you said that a claim is needed more than "common sense" are you alluding to "bold and noble claims"? Third, didn't Popper actually state that he thought that "dogmatism had its place"? (cont)
I agree that Popper's criterion should not be interpreted too "mathematically". But I also agree that he got the main point of what qualifies science as such: it does not try to convince itself, it tests its ideas by seeking for their week point, because it wants to be sure that they actually work (even though they can never be declared True with capital T). This of course does not happen at the individual level. Scientists could all be all intellectually dishonest people and still science be an objective process. Actually, I guess that this is exactly what happens, scientists are human, therefore biased, but scientific discussion, in the end, manages to be objective (although not always at a 100% level)
19:30 - Another example, in the same vein as the SETI one, is a statement like "All metals melt at a high enough temperature". Is this a scientific hypothesis? It intuitively looks like it, but it's actually not falsifiable. If we discovered a metal, for example, that doesn't seem to melt at even the highest man-made temperatures we exposed it to, the defender-of-the-hypothesis could always claim that we just need higher temperature. How could you prove that this metal DOESN'T have a melting point, and that we just haven't reached it yet? Note that the opposite hypothesis ("Not all metals melt at a high enough temperature") is also unfalsifiable. For even if every known metal melts at some temperature, the defender-of-this-hypothesis could claim that we just have yet to discover a metal which doesn't melt. Unless we knew for a fact that there was a finite number of possible metals (AND we had discovered every single one of them), there's no way to falsify this hypothesis. Even the middle-ground hypothesis "Some metals melt at a high enough temperature" isn't really falsifiable. It can certainly be proven TRUE (we only need discover 1 metal that melts for the theory to be vindicated), but it can't be proven FALSE (e.g. if we lived in a world where no metal was ever observed to melt, the defender-of-this-hypothesis could always claim that we just have yet to discover a metal that will melt). What all these examples have in common is that you can't falsify the existence of something. The hypothesis "there exists an X" (whether that X is "alien", or "metal that melts at a high enough temperature" or "metal that does NOT melt at a high-enough temperature") is unfalsifiable because even if we have yet to discover an instance of X, the defender-of-the-hypothesis could always claim that we just haven't looked hard enough.
Do you have thoughts on Fermi's paradox? If there was ever extraterrestrial intelligence in the Milky Way, We should have seen their self-replicating space probes. I think if the Milky Way was empty of intelligence, besides ours, that could be/might be strong evidence that all other galaxies are completely empty of intelligent life.
"A non-falsifiable statement is a statement that could not even in principle be proven false." And a statement that is absolutely, undeniably true is in principle unfalsifiable. 'I have two hands' isn't falsifiable because I clearly DO have two hands. That's not a problem for Popper, though, because science isn't in the business of counting how many hands I have. But it is in the business of sizing astronomical bodies.
that's why its 'in principle'. Falsifiability is the state of which the outcome will be either falsified or unfalsified, so what's the problem? "I have 3 hands" or any n excluding 2, is also falsifiable, which is why deduction includes counter-hypotheses.
On the confidence problem, isn't verisimilitude Popper's solution? I realize that it's unsatisfying, and I'm not necessarily saying thathe lack of a satisfying claim isn't good criticism, but verisimilitude seems to be a reason to prefer one theory over another, even iif it's not "more true", doesn't it? I wish this was explicitly addressed. Anyway, great series of lectures!
Or is that part of the process simply conjecture? So, was Popper referring only to a small part of the scientific process when he called it "deductive"?
5:55 I don’t think Popper would think of a theory as being more likely to be true the more attempts to falsify it fail. That would be an inductivist mistake. If I remember correctly, he doesn’t make claims about the likelihood of any scientific theory. If we haven’t disproven it yet, maybe we are correct; but we are not more likely to be correct if we keep failing to falsify it.
Last, I'm having a hard time understanding how your description of falsificationism "beats" the induction problem with the "all crows are black" scientist. It seems we have the same problem because falsification is pretty much just the inverse of induction. As you identified, all experiements seem to have the same strength, be it the first time or the last time the hypothesis was verified. Am I doing something wrong here?
That's similar to my point about the size of the sun. But it's not enough to be right, it has to be OBVIOUSLY right, undeniably right. No one argues that the sun is smaller than the earth (anymore). If they did, we could start talking about falsifable criteria again. This is Goodman's point: what counts as a test depends on social circumstances and presuppositions.
Surely the claim that the Sun is larger than the Earth is still falsifiable. I was under the impression that a claim is falsifiable if there exists a test that could prove it wrong, regardless of the state of completion of the set of possible tests. At this point in time we might see it as a waste of time to do further tests because we're pretty certain, but we can still say "if we're wrong or the situation suddenly changes we'd be able to find out". Am I misunderstanding something?
Strictly speaking that wouldn't falsify the claim, since the idea is 'the heart circulates blood', not 'the heart is the ONLY thing that circulates blood.' We do heart transplants, after all, in which we keep people alive (with blood pumping) on heart-lung machines for as long as a few hours while swapping out hearts. But perhaps something like that might work, properly revised.
In regard to the objection of what do we do with claims that appear to no longer be falsifiable, ie. "the sun is larger than the earth"......it doesn't really seem to be much of an objection. If we are using deductive reasoning, then wouldn't it be acceptable to move such no-longer-falsifiable claims like "the sun is larger that the earth" from the realm of scientific theory to the realm of necessarily true scientific fact? If not, why not?
Popper doesn't think 'scientific fact' is a thing. There are facts, but the modifier 'science' is reserved statements that can be falsified, only. We could draw such a distinction, of course, but if we wanted to remain Popperians we have a lot of work to do. How do we distinguish a 'scientific fact' from other claims made in a scientific context that simply are unfalsifiable? How do we stop scientists from abusing 'fact' as a way to smuggle pseudoscience into science? Where, exactly, is the line between 'theory' and 'fact', such that we will know when a claim crosses from the former into the later? These aren't unanswerable questions, but they would need an answer if we go down this path.
Not really. For one, we haven't looked too closely at even our local neighborhood. Our solar system is the only system with solid planets we can confidently say we've mapped for life. There could be life nearby, but we just haven't looked close enough yet to find it. But even if our neighborhood is empty, save us, the rest of the universe is still so massive that what we've explored is just a drop in the bucket.
Life may exist elsewhere, and the James Webb Telescope may find it, but I doubt it. Then there's the problem of life existing, going extinct, returning, and on and on over the eons. We'll never know.
exactly they are not deductively falsifiable - which means they hold value only within the framework of their own terms. That's cool though. Because the real question is what do they have to offer when engaged in other frameworks? Now, do the QM guys engage in such dialogues?
Ania Lian And how can a theory be true? It may result in desirable outcomes (eg getting the satellite onto the right orbit), but true? This would block questioning and progress.
Re finding a rabbit fossil in Pre-Cambrian strata (assuming it wasn't due to a mistake): This would be a refutation of the joint hypothesis of (1) evolution AND (2) Earth was never visited by aliens who left a rabbit-like animal behind. So, holistically, paleontological tests of evolution are also tests of prior visitations by aliens. And some friends of mine who are fascinated by the notion that aliens visited earth in the past LOVE those TV shows that purport to interpret "anomalous" fossil "evidence" as proof that aliens did visit Earth in the past. Comments?
The problematic here can be summarised in the question which Foucault posed in his conversation with Veyne: “D’où vient que la vérité soit vraie?” (Veyne 1997: 231). In other words, what is it that makes truth true?
"the bad ones [scientists] are those who because they had had a local success try to produce generality, not by connection of new differences, but by the discounting of all remaining differences as irrelevant." (Latour, 1999, Good and bad generalizations section, para. 2)
And if you take the standard of falsifiability to mean that once we've exhausted all possible kinds of tests to prove something false it's no longer falsifiable, then the only claims which are truly falsifiable are those which are false all along. The true statements we think are falsifiable until they exhaust the tests, and turn out to be unfalsifiable after all. So by doing science, the best case scenario we get is that we can prove that a true claim is nonscientific. Doesn't make sense to me.
Science and falsifiability do not claim a one-hundred percent certainty, only probability statements, like 99.999 percent. There's room in the 0.001 for falsifiability, error.
Popper is being less arrogant than most other philosophers of science because most of the people in the hard sciences accept falsification, and if Popper was alive today he'd say, "yeah, all those scientists are right". But most other philosophers keep telling the scientists that they've got it all wrong.
Thanks for reminding me of that quote. Not sure when he said it, but it may have been true in the 19th century, and possibly even through the 50's. After Quine, Popper and Kuhn, however, it is demonstrably false.
It wouldn't be hard to falsify if it were false, but given that it's true, given that it seems undeniably true that the earth is smaller, how could we falsify it? The only way I can imagine is if it turns out we're living in the Matrix or something like that. And that seems to stretch the meaning of 'falsifable' way too far.
its pretty easy to falsify the inverse hypothesis. I don't this this represents a problem, but an example of deducive process actually working. You have counter-hypothesis and the statement 'falsifiable' is a logical statement, not everything can be falsifIED otherwise any claim will be refuted.
I'm only 2 minutes in but: YES Popper is making a particular type of arrogant claim, an epistemologically arrogant claim. But, Popper is writing on epistemology. All claims from epistemology will be epistemologically arrogant. Also, your reference to Freud is particularly interesting. I believe Popper found Freud epistemologically arrogant. (not saying we can't learn from both, that is, each have meaning to offer us)
On a sidenote, ive head something similar about falsifiability from a creationist, something in the sense of "of course its not falsifiable, becouse its right!"
Yep, that for about a third of the US population and the reason the US will head for a theocracy following the 2024 election. We're seeing the "family values" played out today in Ukraine as a "fundamentalist" Putin levels Ukraine's cities.
I do agree there (though i do think its completly possible that we might be living in "the Matrix"). But if the sun is or would be smaller then the earth, you could take measurements, could proove heliocentrism and/or general relativity wrong. Now, i dont see it, but you mentioned some of the things that could proove general relativity wrong in these videos yourself, measurments on the other hand are simple. Of course they had to be independently confirmed and all that. Alot.
I think this video made a mistake about Popper's thought. First, Popper emphasized times and times, science do no equal to truth, and the non-science does not equal to wrong. He only said a scientific theory must include all aspects that the old theory was not falsified, and include some new explanation that can both explain the fact which old one cannot or never thought of (like light can band), and can be tested-falsified. Such a new theory after times exam, if not falsified, could be replace the old one as the best knowledge up to now. (We can still use the old one in such areas its accuracy is enough and calculation is simpler.) Secondly, Popper said tradition is the main source of human knowledge and apt to have more change to be true. Thirdly, to build a bridge is a problem of technology, an application of a branch of scientific theories. Who ever heard of a bridge-building theory? I think Popper's falsification theory has to be its weakness, like he restricted within experimental science, in which falsification test is relatively easy to do. Still, how to reach the exact background condition remains a problem. Further more, people have to extend idea to those area, where phenomena can not be repeatedly occur, the previous background circumstances can not merge again (see Hayek).
"non-science does not equal to wrong" (or perhaps stronger: is not equal to meaningless) I feel like this is often a valuable sentiment to Popper's work, especially in the context of the preceeding Positivism which dismissed these ideas as metapysics. I feel like Popper's efforts can be considering an improvement on the whole to this, and for the criticism of science he equally is arguing for the meaning in non-science.
I think +SisyphusRedeemed makes wonderful videos, but this one goes to a really bizarre place around 17:38 where he says that the Sun being larger than the Earth and the heart circulating blood are unfalsifiable. I'm pretty sure that doctors and astronomers know how those things could be falsified quite easily, so he is really going out on a strange limb. In the comments he takes it all the way and says, "And a statement that is absolutely, undeniably true is in principle unfalsifiable. 'I have two hands' isn't falsifiable because I clearly DO have two hands." For my own two hands I personally test that theory every day in countless ways. Not only is it falsifiable, but it is tested so often that if it ever stopped being true I would immediately be aware of it. All I have to do is look at the ends of my arms and if I see less than two hands, I have proven it false. It's a bit like the pre-Cambrian rabbit, but much easier. This has been commented on already, but it's so shocking that I had to comment on it again. How can someone so obviously well educated in the philosophy of science make such a mistake about what is falsifiable and what is not?
"Not only is it falsifiable, but it is tested so often that if it ever stopped being true I would immediately be aware of it." But so long as it IS true, it is unfalsifiable, and hence the claim cannot be scientific. That's the problem: intuitively we want to say that science can make claims about things that are TRUE. But if Popper is right, it cannot do this, because a statement that is true is per force unfalsifiable. Yes, if the facts change and it is no longer true then the statement will be falsifiable (because it will then be false.) But so long as it remains true, it is not falsifiable. Does that make sense?
SisyphusRedeemed "But so long as it remains true, it is not falsifiable." That doesn't make sense. If being true made something unfalsifiable then the whole exercise of looking for falsifiable hypotheses would be laughably pointless. Everything we think we know, we only know because we test it repeatedly and it never fails. We only know it is true because it is falsifiable. We think the Sun is bigger than the Earth because somehow astronomers have a way of measuring the Sun. Every time they make that measurement they risk falsifying the idea that the Sun is bigger than the Earth; that is why it is a test. There's no practical chance of that test ever failing, but surely you can imagine the wildly unlikely scenario that every measurement until that point has happened to put the decimal place in the wrong position and given the Sun's size the wrong order of magnitude. It doesn't even matter what unlikely sequence of events could lead us to believe some false idea is true. All that matters is that the idea can be tested, and any idea that can be tested could in principle turn out to be false by failing the test. If one day a test shows that the Sun isn't actually bigger than the Earth, only then will we need to figure out how we got it so wrong for so long. Compare that to an idea that is really unfalsifiable, like "a dozen angels can dance on the head of a pin." One can be tested (and potentially proven false, however unlikely), and the other can never be tested and therefore it can't be falsified even if it is false. All of the ideas that you listed are so easily testable that it's bizarre to call them unfalsifiable, as if they were angels on the head of a pin. The fact that you're willing to call "the heart circulates blood" an unfalsifiable idea makes me wonder what exactly Karl Popper said about falsifiability. Did even he get it wrong? Is this a subtle trick to get people to read Popper's writing just to see if he really said this bizarre thing?
Ansatz66 "If being true made something unfalsifiable then the whole exercise of looking for falsifiable hypotheses would be laughably pointless." You're assuming the 'point' of science is to find the truth. This is something that falsificationism (and Popper explicitly) denies. Falsificationism is committed to anti-realism about science. That is, it doesn't think science is about finding the truth, but rather something else (e.g.--constructing useful models.) That falsificationism is committed to anti-realism is an aspect often overlooked by its champions. "Every time they make that measurement they risk falsifying the idea that the Sun is bigger than the Earth." Actually, they don't. Imagine what would happen if a parallax triangulation at some lab somewhere came back with a result that said the sun was smaller than the earth. What would happen? Would they publish a paper that overturns hundreds of years worth of independent and methodologically varied astronomical measurement? Of course not. They would be a laughing stock if they did. They would immediately conclude that somehow they screwed up; they failed to calibrate their telescope properly, there was a math error somewhere, etc. They would rerun the test again and again, until they found the source of their error. Even if they couldn't find it after hundreds of tests, they still wouldn't publish. They might send their data to another lab to check it for them, but more likely they'd just ignore it, write it off an anomalous data. That's how science actually does work, and (I would argue) should work. It does not (nor should it) operate the way Popper says it should. "All of the ideas that you listed are so easily testable that it's bizarre to call them unfalsifiable," 'Testable' is not the same as 'falsifiable.' A true claim is testable, but it is not falsifiable. That's why Popper rejected the idea that the job of science was to discover true claims. This might be unappealing to you, but it is not some kind of trick, nor is it bizarre: many, many philosophers of science, as well as practicing scientists have been avowed anti-realists. To my knowledge, there has never been any one who accepts falsificationism AND realism about science. I don't see how they could.
SisyphusRedeemed "Even if they couldn't find it after hundreds of tests, they still wouldn't publish. They might send their data to another lab to check it for them, but more likely they'd just ignore it, write it off an anomalous data. That's how science actually does work, and (I would argue) should work. It does not (nor should it) operate the way Popper says it should." I hope that's not how science works. To falsify a broadly accepted belief and be able to repeat that falsification hundreds of times and in the end cover it up would be unforgivably dogmatic. I would hope that such scientists would instead recognize that they have discovered something amazing and mysterious and continue investigating until they have a theory that explains their results. It might be just a math mistake, but it might be some previously unknown effect throwing off the measurement. "A true claim is testable, but it is not falsifiable. That's why Popper rejected the idea that the job of science was to discover true claims." You make it sound like everything science discovers is false because it needs to be false in order to be falsifiable. That's absurd, so that can't be what you are trying to say. Instead, you must be taking the anti-realist position that scientific claims are neither true nor false, but in that case why would you claim that "the Sun is bigger than the Earth" is true? Why not include that claim in your anti-realist philosophy? I don't think we even need to be anti-realist to solve the problem. For any testable claim, just having the slightest doubt that you actually know that a claim is true should be enough to call the claim falsifiable, and it would be unscientific to not have that doubt since science is unable to prove the truth of scientific claims. Science doubts everything and attempts to falsify everything, so the only things that science should consider unfalsifiable are those things which are untestable, because otherwise you are letting science slip into dogma. It's horrific that scientists might refuse to investigate a testable idea because they have decided that it is true and therefore unfalsifiable.
Ansatz66 "To falsify a broadly accepted belief and be able to repeat that falsification hundreds of times and in the end cover it up would be unforgivably dogmatic." I would argue it's actually appropriately humble. That's because they realize that even hundreds of contrary results can't overturn millions of observations over hundreds of years and from myriad different methodologies. And that is to say nothing of the massive theoretical ramifications this would entail (if the sun really were smaller than the earth, and we didn't notice all this time? Goodbye general relativity! Hell, basic trigonometry might be in trouble.) As Kuhn puts the point, "Anomalies are not counterexamples." It is far more likely that these researchers made a mistake (or several) than that everything that has led us to believe the sun is larger than the earth is wrong. That is, they DIDN'T falsify the claim, not once, not hundreds of times. "It might be just a math mistake, but it might be some previously unknown effect throwing off the measurement." It might be either of those. The first is far more likely than the second, which is why they're more likely to just write it off as a mistake, even if they can't pinpoint it. Hunting down the exact error just might not be worth their time. But either way, neither of those is falsifying the claim 'the sun is larger than the earth.' "You make it sound like everything science discovers is false because it needs to be false in order to be falsifiable." It's not that it's false, it's that science takes no position on whether or not it is true or false. That's just not the job of science, according to antirealists. " why would you claim that "the Sun is bigger than the Earth" is true? Why not include that claim in your anti-realist philosophy?" First off, it's not MY anti-realist philosophy, it's Popper's. Second, I claim 'the Sun is bigger than the earth' is true because I think it *is* true. That's my *whole point*, that this is a problem for falsificationism. I spell it out in a formal argument: (1) it's obviously a truth discovered by science that the sun is bigger than the earth. (2) Falsificationism cannot account for this because it is committed to anti-realism. (3) Hence, there is a problem with falsificationism. "For any testable claim, just having the slightest doubt that you actually know that a claim is true should be enough to call the claim falsifiable," This sounds like the difference between 'fallibilism' and 'falsificationism'. Fallibilism is an epistemic position, the admission that it's possible we might be wrong about (almost) everything we think we know. Falsificationism is a methodology in science, it makes no claims at all about the truth or falsity of our beliefs, but rather makes claims about how science ought to proceed. The prior does not commit us to anti-realism, but the later does. "It's horrific that scientists might refuse to investigate a testable idea because they have decided that it is true and therefore unfalsifiable." And that is the motivation (or one of them) behind scientific anti-realism right there. Recognize what that sentence entails: science should never decide that an idea is true.
"the result is known to a very high degree of certainty before we do the experiment." But what about AFTER we do the experiment? Don't we know it with certainty then? If not, then I'm not sure 'certainty' means anything.
Also, I'm sick of philosophers being selectively pedantic. Now I will be pedantic: we have a theory (call it TOE1) which says, among a whole host of other things, that there are no pre-Cambrian rabbits. We find a pre-Cambrian rabbit, and accordingly falsify a "large part" of TOE1. We then alter and adjust and _change_ TOE1 in order to account for this. But now TOE1 is different, now TOE1 makes different predictions and therefore has _different properties_ to what it had before. But if two things do not share all of the same properties, then they are not the _same identical thing_. This new version of TOE1 _is not_ TOE1 any more, it's now TOE2. A different theory, with many points in common with the older theory, but different nonetheless. Hence, if we found a pre-Cambrian rabbit we would have falsified the theory of evolution _as it stands in its current state_.
I partly agree, but it may be elements of hypetheses and phenomena /outside/ the theory that end up being changed (albeit perhaps that would seem ridiculous in that circumstance, but we could discuss whether the rabbit has gone through a time portal...but I'll leave this particular example alone*) -So /something/ becomes falsified is point A that I'd make, but not necessarily the theory, and likely the hollistic body of theories and observations, from which it is hard or impossible to extract where the theory is. That's in part why Duhem doesn't entirely refute Popper! -can we take falsification as a hypothetical concept and define unfalsifiability? I think that its likely we can, so there is still merit in the unfalsifiability claims against non-science. This is because the concept of falsifiability can be described as a virtual model where things can be isolated from methodology and other assumptions. Essentially, if something actually is unfalsifiable we can't even test it to find these anomalies at all. This isn't refuted by the claim that 'well, nothing can in practice be falsified so we cannot make a difference' because the claim of falsifiability is a purely logical claim. -adjustments don't all have equal merit, of course. defining what that merit is will be difficult but if the pre-cambrian rabbit time-portal is unfalsifiable (under certain situations it will be) it will lose merit, under its other situations it will produce logical disrepencies. -we can still design methodology to /minimise/ these productions of anomalies although not entirely remove them, but the counter-examples given aren't typical of a well designed experiment, so often can fall short as counter-examples.
Your claim that Popper is 'bold, aggressive, arrogant' is likely based in your BELIEF that you have understood the problem of induction, understanding of which is the key to understanding the Popper's problem of demarcation between science and pseudo-science. Unfortunately, the likelihood that one can arrive at correct understanding of anything via BELIEF is infinitely small. Consider this: Hume, Kant, Popper, Born and many others all recognized the existence of the problem of induction with no discrepancy whatsoever among them. They differ only in what is the solution to it. Popper provides exhaustive proof of errors in the solutions offered by those thinkers and provides the proof of his solution/explanation to the problem of induction. In short, Popper has shown that we have no choice but to use induction in hypothesis testing, but we use deduction (especially Modus Tollens) to narrow down towards the truth. There is no other way to do it! Modus Tollens, being negative deductive, excludes contradictions with certainty - the only certainty we have in any scientific theory as the very hypotheses are always inductive = uncertain. That is why Popper directs us to falsification (Modus Tollens) as THE test of the scientific character of a scientific theory. This Popper's conclusion is a necessary outcome of his reasoning, and so far this reasoning has not been meaningfully challenged. BTW, would you consider my assertion that 2 x 2 = 4 as being bold, aggressive, arrogant?
My take on your understanding of Popper’s ‘demarcation’ is based on listening only to the first few minutes of your video - enough to exclude likelihood that your understanding of Popper is sufficiently complete - at least sufficient to make your bald criticism of Popper ‘arrogance’ or claiming legitimacy of a scientist telling Popper “who the hell are you to tell me what is and what isn’t science”. In 1993 the Federal Rules of Evidence was amended with instructions to the judges that they “must ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable” (1993, 589). In effort to guide the judges, the Court offered some “general observations” about admissibility of scientific evidence which include testability (or falsifiability), which of course is translation of Popper’s finding. Now square this up with what you think about Popper’s work and hopefully realize that it is at odd not only with what is assumed to be an understanding by a philosophy teacher, but also with the understanding by the Supreme Court of what represents science on our land. Scientists have no problem in recognizing I strongly suggest that you re-read the first chapter of Conjectures and Refutations, and that you do not stop reading and re-reading it till you truly critically interiorize ALL the reasoning contained within it. Since you had spent decades dipping into the topic I only expect that the emotional reward of this exercise will turn out to be that much more precious for you. The best, Jan.
Let me see if I get this straight: the whole and sum of your objection is my use of the word 'arrogance'? You take no issue with the substance, just with my take on his attitude? Do I have that right?
Well I hope what I've already said about Quine (i.e. holism about testing) in the previous lecture, Popper in this one, and what I will say about Kuhn in the next two will make the case, indirectly at least.
Well I hope what I've already said about Quine (i.e. holism about testing) in the previous lecture, Popper in this one, and what I will say about Kuhn in the next two will make the case, indirectly at least.
Well I hope what I've already said about Quine (i.e. holism about testing) in the previous lecture, Popper in this one, and what I will say about Kuhn in the next two will make the case, indirectly at least.
Well I hope what I've already said about Quine (i.e. holism about testing) in the previous lecture, Popper in this one, and what I will say about Kuhn in the next two will make the case, indirectly at least.
