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FALSIES_AGAIN
July 12, 2016
May 14, 2018
The true faith of falsification was promoted
recently in the reddit "philosophy" group,
by a Mohamed Shaban:
"Falsification is the cornerstone of the scientific method.
Scientific progress is achieved by the falsification of
hypotheses, rather than by the establishment of truth."
I made the point that there really
wasn't any consensus among FALSIES
scientists or philosophers on the
value of the idea of "falsification".
This time I tried quoting the wikipedia article on
Falsifiability:
"In their book 'Fashionable Nonsense' published in the UK as
Intellectual Impostures) the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont criticized falsifiability on the grounds that it
does not accurately describe the way science really works.
They argue that theories are used because of their successes,
not because of the failures of other theories. ... Sokal and
Bricmont write, 'When a theory successfully withstands an
attempt at falsification, a scientist will, quite naturally,
consider the theory to be partially confirmed and will accord
it a greater likelihood or a higher subjective probability."
"But Popper will have none of this: throughout his life he
was a stubborn opponent of any idea of 'confirmation' of a
theory, or even of its 'probability'. ... [but] the history
of science teaches us that scientific theories come to be
accepted above all because of their successes.' "
(Nov 29, 2018)
Some other issues
with falsifiability:
[link]
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
is worth a look also, of course: (But while the SEP is
usually better than
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ wikipedia, not this
time, I think.)
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