6 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: What exactly is wrong with falsificationism?
There is a "survival of the fittest" among scientific theories, so the best theories are ones that haven't faced falsifying evidence, rather than being ones with the most confirming evidence in its favor.
There needs to be more to it than this, otherwise a theory that hasn't been tested at all is just as good as a theory that has been tested 100 times. For Karl Popper what was important was that a theory had passed severe tests. The severity of a test is determined by how likely it is to falsify a theory.
In regards to criticisms of falsificationism, if taken as a necessary condition for a proposition to be scientific, is that while a proposition is falsifiable its negation may (will?) not be. For example, "All A's have the property B" is a falsifiable statement, but its negation "there is some A that does not have the property B" is not falsifiable (depending on its scope). So if we accept falsificationism we have this weird situation where a proposition is scientific while its negation is not scientific.
Another problem is that probability statements are not falsifiable. If I claim that a balanced coin has a 50% chance of landing on heads there is no possible run of coin flips that can falsify that claim, all runs are equally likely. Yet we might not want to expunge probabilistic claims from science.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/10/2014 at 13:54 UTC
4 upvotes, 2 direct replies
On your second criticism:
its negation "there is some A that does not have the property B" is not falsifiable (depending on its scope).
Popper explicitly and repeatedly says that strictly existential statements are, at least in principle, verifiable; strictly universal statements are, at least in principle, falsifiable. Why then is agreement with Popper criticism of Popper?
On your third criticism:
Another problem is that probability statements are not falsifiable.
Popper spends several sections in *The Logic of Scientific Discovery* talking about which methodological rules should be adopted so that probability statements are falsifiable. Popper's addressing of this criticism in *LoSD* may be in error, but it has been addressed. A more substantive articulation of this criticism--that, for example, the methodological rules Popper lays out are mistaken for such-and-such a reason--is needed.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/10/2014 at 13:49 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
otherwise a theory that hasn't been tested at all is just as good as a theory that has been tested 100 times.
I have been unable to understand how this is a substantive criticism. If a theory has not been tested at all, then it has no predictive content that has been tested. It has said nothing whatsoever about what the theory that has been tested 100 times has, presumably, said a great deal. And this alone would be enough to favour the theory that has been tested 100 times over the theory that has no predictive content that has been tested. That is, until there is an available crucial experiment that we can conduct.