So he was forced to find other, more roundabout ways to do the same thing and, while this might have been okay if his anti-inductivism had proven to be superior to a probabilist framework for epistemology, most philosophers of science don’t think it’s the case.Īnother criticism that came up repeatedly is that I only attacked a very crude version of falsificationism that neither Popper nor anybody else has ever defended. (Here is something that, using examples from the history of science to illustrate, explains how you can use Bayes’s theorem to determine whether you should blame the theory or the auxiliary hypotheses.) But this answer was not available to Popper, because he rejected induction, which in turn means that he didn’t think we could assign probabilities to hypotheses. If you ask someone why, the most natural reason he can give is that, given the available evidence, the theory is just more likely to be at fault than the auxiliary hypotheses. Sometimes, when a prediction fails to come true, it’s just more reasonable to blame the theory rather than the auxiliary hypotheses. As we shall see shortly, even Popper realized that, but he nevertheless emphasized the role of falsification because he rejected induction. This means that, as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science, falsifiability doesn’t really do any work. The point was only that, because a theory always rely on many auxiliary hypotheses to make observable predictions, someone who is committed enough to it can never be forced to abandon it by the failure of a prediction because such a failure can always be blamed on the auxiliary hypotheses instead of the theory. But nothing I say in my post implies that and, of course, I don’t think it’s true. In this post, I briefly address both of those criticisms.įirst, because I argued in my post that, strictly speaking, no theory is falsifiable, many people seem to think that I believe it’s never irrational to stick to a theory in the face of seemingly contrary evidence. Second, some people have accused me of attacking a straw man, saying I only attacked a very crude form of falsificationism that neither Popper nor anybody else believes. First, many people seem to believe that I’m some kind of postmodernist who thinks it’s not important to empirically test scientific theories, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I really don’t have time to reply to all of them, so I will focus on two lines of criticism that have come up repeatedly. On the other hand, it also attracted a number of criticisms, which I guess was also to be expected after the post blew up on social networks. I’m particularly glad that many scientists seem to have found it useful, since I primarily wrote it for them. My post on falsificationism turned out to be a lot more popular than I expected.
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