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To: general_re
Thank you so much for your post!

Life is very rarely so neat and clean as to present you with exactly two possible answers, one absolutely right, and the other absolutely wrong.

Indeed, but in the context of science, a theory has value precisely because it can be falsified, according to Popper:

Sir Karl Popper "Science as Falsification," 1963

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analyzed" and crying aloud for treatment.

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.


47 posted on 06/15/2003 8:51:32 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
Indeed, but in the context of science, a theory has value precisely because it can be falsified, according to Popper...

Very true, but that doesn't mean that when you are presented with two falsifiable theories, one of them must therefore be true, which is essentially what was claimed by the original sentence I quoted:

According to Sir Karl Popper, when given two theories an experiment will decide one true and one false.

But, of course, both theories could be false, at the very least. Consider two theories about where babies come from - A) the stork brings them, or; B) from the cabbage patch. Since both of these are essentially falsifiable, and given the reasoning above, we should be able to conceive of an experiment that will prove one of these theories to be true ;)

56 posted on 06/15/2003 9:37:19 PM PDT by general_re (ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.)
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