Popper: What Is Real Scientific Practice?
Popper: What is real scientific practice?
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Using Popper’s paper that you read, do you find that his approach is a valid way to define scientific practice? Do you think it can be applied to all branches of science? Did you change your mind about inductive reasoning? Do you think psychoanalysis is scientific? Do you think Popper’s falsification theory limits what we can consider science?
Answer the questions in 500 words or less. Please cite your work using both Popper’s paper and the Oakes reading to defend your ideas.
Popper’s Falsification
From inductivism to Popper’s falsification
From: Philosophy and the Science for Everyone by Michela Massimi. ISBN: 9781138785434
Karl Popper
Philosophers of science are interested in understanding the nature of scientific knowledge and its distinctive features. For a very long time, they strove to find what they thought might be the distinctive method of science, the method that would allow scientists to make informed decisions about what counts as a scientific theory.
The importance of demarcating good science from pseudo-science is neither otiose nor a mere philosophical exercise. It is at the very heart of social policy, when decisions are taken at the governmental level about how to spend taxpayers’ money.
Karl Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was, undoubtedly, one of the most influential philosophers of the early twentieth century to have contributed to the debate about demarcating good science from pseudo-science. In this section we very briefly review some of his seminal ideas.
Popper’s battleground was the social sciences. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the German-speaking world, a lively debate took place between the so-called Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences, including mathematics, physics, and chemistry) and the Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences, including psychology and the emergent psychoanalysis), and whether the latter could rise to the status of proper sciences on a par with the natural sciences.
This is the historical context in which Popper began his philosophical reflections in the 1920s. Popper’s reflections were influenced by the Vienna Circle, a group of young intellectuals from different branches of science. The philosophical view adopted by the Vienna Circle is known as logical empiricism:knowledge comes in two kinds; the first kind is knowledge of logical truths (truths independent of experience); the second is empirical knowledge, whose truths are based on experience.
Popper’s influential book The Logic of Scientific Discovery was first published in 1934 (the English translation came much later, in 1959) in the Vienna Circle series edited by Schlick; and it dealt precisely with the problem of how to demarcate good science from pseudoscience.
Before Popper, the received view about scientific knowledge and the method of science was inductivism: on this view, scientific theories are confirmed by inductive inferences from an increasing number of positive instances to a universally valid conclusion.
For example, Newton’s second law seems confirmed by many positive instances from the pendulum, to harmonic oscillators and free fall, among others. We can think of scientific theories as sets of sentences, i.e. laws of nature; and laws of nature, as taking the form of true universal generalizations, ‘For all objects x, if Fx then Gx’ (e.g. Newton’s second law would read as follows: if an external force acts on a body of mass m, then the body will accelerate). And we can think of true universal generalizations as being confirmed when a sufficiently large number of positive instances (and no negative instances) have been found for them. Inductivism was at work in the logical empiricists’ criterion of verification: namely the idea that any claim or statement is scientific if there is a way of empirically verifying it (i.e. if there is a way of finding positive empirical instances confirming that claim or statement).
The problem with inductive methodology – according to Popper – is that it is too liberal as a method for demarcating good science from pseudo-science.
Political theories such as Marxism or Freud’s psychoanalysis would equally meet the requirements of inductivism. A Freudian psychoanalyst could appeal to plenty of positive instances of people’s dreams that can confirm the validity of Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus complex, for example. But is this per se sufficient to license the scientific status of Freud’s psychoanalysis? People that read horoscopes can similarly claim that there are positive instances in their monthly working schedule confirming the horoscope’s warning that it is going to be a very demanding month for Aquarians! Does it mean that horoscopes are scientific? Positive instances are where one wants to find them. Thus, to demarcate good science from pseudo-science, Popper thought, we need to probe a little deeper.
The problem – as Popper saw it – is that theories such as psychoanalysis do not make specific predictions, and their general principles are so broadly construed as to be compatible with any particular observations, whereas scientific theories such as Copernicus’ heliocentric theory or Einstein’s relativity do make novel predictions, i.e. predictions of new phenomena or entities. Remember our assignment about Astronomy?
As the historian Koyré once said, the amazing thing about Copernican astronomy is that it worked, despite the overcast sky of Copernicus’ Poland! Using Copernican astronomy, Galileo could predict the phases of Venus, a novel phenomenon not predicted by Ptolemaic astronomy and observed by Galileo himself with his telescope. Or consider Einstein’s general relativity, which predicted light-bending, a phenomenon indeed observed by Arthur Eddington’s expedition to Brazil in 1919. What makes Copernicus’ or Einstein’s theory ‘scientific’ is not just having positive instances, but instead, being able to make very specific and precise predictions about previously undreamt-of phenomena – predictions that may turn out to be wrong.
Popper’s conclusion was that scientists should be looking for instances that are risky predictions, namely potential falsifiers (predictions that if proved wrong, would reject the theory). Having no potential falsifiers is the hallmark of dubious scientific standing.
Pseudo-scientific theories have a tendency to accommodate evidence, as opposed to predicting novel, risky phenomena. But no matter how many positive instances of a generalization one has observed or accommodated, there is still no guarantee that the next instance will not falsify it. No matter how many white swans we might have observed, nothing excludes the possibility that the next observed swan will be black, as indeed explorers found in Australia. Hence, Popper’s conclusion that the distinctive method of science does not consist in confirming hypotheses, but in falsifying them, looking for one crucial piece of negative evidence that may refute the whole theory.
According to Popper, science proceeds by a method of conjectures and refutations: scientists start with bold (theoretically and experimentally unwarranted) conjectures about some phenomena, deduce novel undreamt-of predictions, and then go about finding potential falsifiers for those predictions. Currently accepted scientific theories have passed severe tests and have survived, without being falsified as yet. If a theory does not pass severe tests, and/or if there are no sufficient or suitable potential falsifiers for it, the theory cannot be said to be scientific. The history of science is full of theories that enjoyed a relative period of empirical success until they were eventually falsified and rejected: from the caloric theory of Lavoisier (which regarded heat as an imponderable fluid) to Stahl’s phlogiston theory in the eighteenth century, and Newton’s ether theory. Science has grown across centuries by dismantling and rejecting previously successful theories – scientific progress is characterized and made possible by falsification.
To conclude, falsificationism is the distinctive method of science, according to Popper. It is a deductive (instead of inductive) method, whereby scientists start with bold conjectures, and deduce novel predictions, which then they go about testing. If the predictions prove wrong, the conjecture is falsified and replaced with a new one. If the predictions prove correct, the conjecture is corroborated and will continue to be employed to make further predictions and pass more tests, until proven wrong.
To review the concept of Demarcation and falsificationism watch the video below.