Hypotheses should be refutable - discuss
- Thread starter red rose
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One problem with Popper's falsificationism, considered as pure logic, is: does it apply to itself?
That is, what could falsify the proposition "we should regard as science hypotheses that are falsifiable"?
Or: what could falsify the proposition "we should consider as serious candidates for facthood those hypotheses which are falsifiable and extensive and rigorous attempts to falsify which have failed so to do"?
At this point most philosophers of science go "oh, fuck it" and get on with discussing the nature of theory - leaving the above argument to the hardcore epistemologists.
Red Rose - if you want to mess with your tutors' heads, try some Bruno Latour - We have never been modern is IIRC not a bad place to start; The Parliament of Nature is more fun but as I recall it tends more to assume you've read your Kant. Latour is quite sane, in my humble opinion, totally opposed to the positivists, and if you call him a postmodernist he'll come over and slap you with a baguette
Edited to add: somehow missed the line where ICB suggested applying Popper to Popper
That is, what could falsify the proposition "we should regard as science hypotheses that are falsifiable"?
Or: what could falsify the proposition "we should consider as serious candidates for facthood those hypotheses which are falsifiable and extensive and rigorous attempts to falsify which have failed so to do"?
At this point most philosophers of science go "oh, fuck it" and get on with discussing the nature of theory - leaving the above argument to the hardcore epistemologists.
Red Rose - if you want to mess with your tutors' heads, try some Bruno Latour - We have never been modern is IIRC not a bad place to start; The Parliament of Nature is more fun but as I recall it tends more to assume you've read your Kant. Latour is quite sane, in my humble opinion, totally opposed to the positivists, and if you call him a postmodernist he'll come over and slap you with a baguette
Edited to add: somehow missed the line where ICB suggested applying Popper to Popper
Another odd thing about Popper is that you can never say that a hypothesis is true - you cannot say that the earth goes round the sun - only that it is closer to the truth to say that it does.
Nor can we say that we have evidence that the earth goes round the sun - and scientists do not think within these constraints!!!!111!!!
Smashing your little anti-communist bubble now aren't I!!!111!!!
Nor can we say that we have evidence that the earth goes round the sun - and scientists do not think within these constraints!!!!111!!!
Smashing your little anti-communist bubble now aren't I!!!111!!!
Seeing as I have no evidence that this message exists, I'm going to ignore it.Gmarthews said:we all see the world through our own senses and thus there is no such thing as an absolute, so everything is relative, meaning that we cannot know anything. Popper famously pointed out that we don't even know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow!!
Why anyone with even vaguely socialist values would accept a contentious theory which rejects it is beyond me.
The thing is the falsification principle was never intended as a coverall guide to what kind of hypotheses you should frame, or to truth, but as a pragmatic guideline for the practice of scientific discovery by experimentation.
As I commented elsewhere, the hypothesis that DNA came to exist as the result of the random concatenation of various amino acids in a primordial soup, is neither verifiable nor falsifiable without a time machine, but most materialists believe it.
As I commented elsewhere, the hypothesis that DNA came to exist as the result of the random concatenation of various amino acids in a primordial soup, is neither verifiable nor falsifiable without a time machine, but most materialists believe it.
Well, you seem to have provided an example of how falsification works, but not an argument that proves it.
I actually have to read that book for an essay - I thought it Magee by Popper, and couldn't find it
My point being that I have no evidence/I do not know it is true that you posted a message on this thread (as we do not "learn" such things)
And it excludes finding out if things exist from science - which is shit.
is true according to Popper, but there's the why that is true - the reasoning behind it - so that there is no such thing as truth, that we do not have evidence supporting any statements, that we can never say that a some theory has greater verismilitide than another... other problems (or not), but I don't know them yet.
I actually have to read that book for an essay - I thought it Magee by Popper, and couldn't find it
My point being that I have no evidence/I do not know it is true that you posted a message on this thread (as we do not "learn" such things)
And it excludes finding out if things exist from science - which is shit.
Gmart
Well-Known Member
the book is Popper by Bryan Magee
If you don't find the example convincing, fine the book has many. I think you are maybe getting weighed down by what you think true should mean. I have to admit that your post does make no sense to me. I didn't ask any why questions, i was merely reproducing an example which showed that we learnt from falsification but didn't from induction which merely repeats experiments. Water will always boil at 100, and we could do that same experiment over and over, we wouldn't learn a thing.
I have indeed posted a message on this thread. It is before you in black and white. The physical world is unavoidable. You can argue metaphysically with it but the moment you bang your head on a cupboard you'll remember the importance of it.
If you don't find the example convincing, fine the book has many. I think you are maybe getting weighed down by what you think true should mean. I have to admit that your post does make no sense to me. I didn't ask any why questions, i was merely reproducing an example which showed that we learnt from falsification but didn't from induction which merely repeats experiments. Water will always boil at 100, and we could do that same experiment over and over, we wouldn't learn a thing.
I have indeed posted a message on this thread. It is before you in black and white. The physical world is unavoidable. You can argue metaphysically with it but the moment you bang your head on a cupboard you'll remember the importance of it.
I'm going to guess that you have slightly the wrong end of the stick. What falsification says is, not only do we learn when water does not boil at 100 degrees, but we didn't learn anything the first time that someone heated water and it boiled at 100.Gmarthews said:
In addition: I'm not sure that they would be able to say that "some water boiled at 100 degrees" and still be falsificationists - that has certain amounts of (basic) theoory behind it - like themometers measure temperature.
In addition 2: What they have to keep observation senetences to are "an X is at A", and they have to accept that they only reason that that it is true that "an X is at A", is convention.
In addition 3: Some philosophers don't think that Popper can have a concept of truth, becasue he doesn't have a critereon for it. Also, the fact that there is an X at A, is not evidence for anything.
