The point at 947 was particularly interesting since I had just minutes before read this article by Karl Popper: Sir Karl Popper "Science as Falsification," 1963.
I agree with you that intuition is a very good thing for the troubleshooter, the soldier, the parent, the artist and a vast number of scenarios. In many instances the intuition is “informed” by training, qualia and past experience.
But intuition in science can be problematic, because charismatic theories are not true by popular intuitive vote. That’s where the Popper article comes in. You might be interested in this excerpt:
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasize by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations." …
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
The point at 947 was particularly interesting since I had just minutes before read this article by Karl Popper: Sir Karl Popper "Science as Falsification," 1963.
I agree with you that intuition is a very good thing for the troubleshooter, the soldier, the parent, the artist and a vast number of scenarios. In many instances the intuition is “informed” by training, qualia and past experience.
Well.... Thank you very much for your relating this, about falsification. Of course, intuition is necessary, in order to even come up with attempts to falsify, right. It is difficult I'd say, to come up with many experiments that aren't developed by a scientist's imagining of at least elements of it, in order to devise it.
To me, while Popper's discontent with confirmation is very valid, I think that at heart this is a matter of man's overconfidence and overextentions of his pet theories (especially in the theorist's heart). -- I suppose then, a a struggle with evidences is what it is at head. ;-) Pinging bb here, since I think she also has a pet theory of the overextension of theories by theorists!
And as it happens, djf was just telling me about Kurt Godel and A. S. Eddington.
What would Godel have to say about Popper's confidence that anything that can be falsified is untrue? (But then, not even mathematics provides "proof" in quite the way that objective physical evidence is scientific proof.)
(This particular tangent of mine came from my disagreement with way of dismissing Heartlander's little parable of the thinking machine and the programmer out of hand, based upon a kind of anecdotal use of scientific evidence. Heartlander was dealing with matters beyond physical sciences, in a very logical little fable about consciousness not being subsumptive of consciouslessness.)
I think you are really referring to learned heuristics, rules and patterns that we've learned and can apply them without conscious intent. The difference being that if you really think about why you intuited something, you can come up with a reasonable explanation. Intuition typically fails because the learned scope is much narrower than the attempted application.
The problem (and I've had this discussion about the definition of "intuition" before) is that there isn't a really clear definition of what that means. Some would say that it only applies to subconscious rational heuristics, while many people actually do define it to include a lot of irrational emotionally driven (lack of) reasoning. It is hard to know if I agree or disagree with a person on the issue of "intuition" because that term has particularly fuzzy definition in general usage.