What is "Falsifiability" and O'ism's view of it?

Metaphysics and Epistemology
21

I don’t know about “Popperianism” (we’re only talking about Falsifiability here - it isn’t some cult of personality), but Falsifiability is not anywhere close to Nihilism.

This is simply your “Falsifiability” theory – I assume you’ve never actually read Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery. That is the historical source of the contemporary fascination with “falsifiability” as the desideratum for scientific reasoning. You need to do a bit more reading in the philosophy of science. I recommend

Professor David Stove’s works, especially his critique of Popper’s irrational method. It may be that you haven’t bought into the full nihilistic package that Popper is peddling; however, when you claim that you are a believer in Falsificationsm which is a “mainstay of modern Western scientific thought”, then you must be referring to Popper’s LSD, since that is in fact widely held to be “the standard” for contemporary philosophy of science. If you don’t consider Falsificationism to be the same as Popper’s (anti-)epistemology, is there some other source that sets forth the credo of Falsificationism? I’m assuming it’s not a theory you made up yourself. So I’m just curious to see whether it really is different from Popperian nihilism.

22

Of course I’ve read Popper’s Logik der Forschung. Being a Falsificationist, however, no more makes one a “Popperian” than being an Objectivist makes one a Randroid, or being a fan of modern highways and their gently curving off-ramps makes one an Adolf Hitlerite. What you’re doing amounts to nothing better than artificially broadening Falsification into “Popperianism” in order to launch offal at the simple concept from outside of its bounds. And now, instead of attempting to defend your indefensable comments, you instead evade the issue entirely. So then, in further response to your matrix-like evasion, my take on Falsification, as articulated above, certainly isn’t something that I simply came up with. This is the orthodox scientific employ of Falsification whenever and wherever I have encountered it used as a division between scientific and nonscientific theory (which is everywhere that scientists make such a distinction). Besides Popper, if you’re actually interested in scouring the dry tombs of original impetuses (not that such has bearing on the context of this discussion), you will also find Ernest Gellner, and still others.

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Rei Ichi, are you familiar with the Objectivist interpretation of the concept of the arbitrary?

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Besides Popper, if you’re actually interested in scouring the dry tombs of original impetuses (not that such has bearing on the context of this discussion), you will also find Ernest Gellner, and still others.

Wow. If you’re going to pick a bad philosopher to base your view of science on, you did an excellent job there. Not quite in the league with Kant, but much more au courant. An opponent of “the dictatorship of the free market”, a thoroughgoing rationalist. Well, you haven’t bothered to define this so-called theory of Falsificationism, and you haven’t even given us the slightest indication that it is worthy of our interest, nor have you identified any specific work that sets out that belief system (and I’m certainly not going to spend the rest of my life reading the babbling of Gellner just to find out if he did say anything relevant to the topic). The fallacious nature of petitio principii has been known since, yes, Aristotle (en archei aiteisthai), so given how fundamental that principle is to logic, for a Johnny-come-lately neo-Popperian or Gellnerian religion to have anything to contribute to the discussion, there has to be something (1) new and (2) true. The part which is true, is old. You’ve presented nothing new. What I observe is that you’re evading the point that the one theory that is known, Popper’s theory which takes the impossibility of knowing whether a universally quantifies statement is true, is the only theory that has a legitimate claim to the name “Falsificationism”. And it’s nihilism.

Which part of Popper’s nihilism do you reject? Or, what aspect of “falsificationism” do you advocate, other than the well-known Aristotelian recognition of the fallacious nature of petitio principii? I’m just looking for any evidence whatsoever that you are not a Popperian nihilist. All I am hearing from you is unsubstantiated denials – evasion of the reality of your epistemology, it appears to me. Try replacing some of your deconstructionist verbiage with clear statements of philosophical reasoning: that might help make any latent point you have more accessible.

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It looks like DavidOdden and rei ichi are arguing completely different things. rei seems to define a falsificationist as someone who believes that for a theory to be scientific it must be falsifiable (which means that it can be tested not some bullshit that for it to be true it must actually be false!). DavidOdden is talking about the philosophy falsificationism, which I admittedly don’t know much about. The first is simply how science works, the second is a philosophy.

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rei seems to define a falsificationist as someone who believes that for a theory to be scientific it must be falsifiable (which means that it can be tested not some bullshit that for it to be true it must actually be false!).

If that’s what he’s claiming, then he isn’t advocating falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theories, he’s advocating testability, i.e. recognition of petitio principii, which has been recognised for over two milenia and thus is hardly worth mentioning as your “guiding principle” (especially if you’re not evn going to give credit where credit is due). But he hasn’t clarified his position, so we’ll have to wait for him to put some content into this “theory” of his. I accept that he may well have decided to ignore the literal meaning of “falsifiable”, and may have also rejected the particular nihilist redefinition of the word that Popper uses, coming up with some other redefinition of the term of his own, but I don’t usually assume that people engage in the fallacy of arbitrary redefinition, until I see evidence that this is what a person is doing. A simply admission like “Yeah, I’m just talking about petitio principii, nothing more” would be quite persuasive.

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If that’s what he’s claiming, then he isn’t advocating falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theories, he’s advocating testability…

falsifiable

adj : capable of being tested (verified or falsified) by experiment or observation [syn: confirmable, verifiable]

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Not all dictionaries have this definition, but it has started to appear.

Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science that amounts to the apparently paradoxical idea that a proposition or theory cannot be scientific if it does not admit consideration of the possibility of its being false.

“Falsifiable” does not mean “false”. For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be possible in principle to make an observation that would show the proposition to be false , even if that observation has not been made. For example, the proposition “All crows are black” would be falsified by observing one white crow.

Falsificationists claim that any theory that is not falsifiable is unscientific. Psychoanalytic theory, for example, is held up by the proponents of Karl Popper as an example of an ideology rather than a science. A patient regarded by his psychoanalyst as “in denial” about his sexual orientation may be viewed as confirming he is homosexual simply by denying that he is; and if he has sex with women, he may be accused of trying to buttress his denials. In other words, there is no way the patient could convincingly demonstrate his heterosexuality to his analyst. This is an example of what Popper called a “closed circle”. The proposition that the patient is homosexual is not falsifiable.

*emphasis added*

“A theory that does not admit consideration of the possibility of its being false,” is one that does not allow rational discussion about what it says. Like the psychologists theory, the actual makeup of the theory disallows debate on the subject. Conspiracy theories are a common example of something that is unfalsifiable.

Solopsism is another example of a theory that is unfalsifiable. The actual theory itself is designed to ignore any information that might bring the theory into question.

All scientific theories must be falsifiable if they are to be of any value, in that when data is presented that doesn’t agree with the theory it must be taken into account and not simply hand waved away. Also, just because a theory has passed every test put to it so far, this does not mean that the theory is correct. Take the huge number of tests many of Newton’s theories passed before being ultimately proved false. If a theory is ultimately true it will obviously pass every proposed test. It is unscientific to posit theories that are either untestable or that automatically dismiss any evidence as irrelevent.

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Let’s just focus on one part of the Wikipedia statement that you quoted: “For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be possible in principle to make an observation that would show the proposition to be false”. That is an entirely inaccurate characterisation of the “good” content of falsification, because it completely confuses the metaphysical and the epistemological. If a scientific statement does indeed correctly describe an aspect of the universe, then there never will be any observation which shows that the statement is false. If it is in the nature of the universe that X is a correct description, then it isn’t possible that it is an in correct description, and it is impossible in principle (the principle being the law of the excluded middle). Chucking in a disclaimer like “falsifiable does not mean false” does not avoid the problem.

An unfalsifiable theory is one that is contradictory. This is a problem of epistemology and not metaphysics. “Possibilities” are irrelevant when reason is abandoned, as in the case where you reject the law of the excluded middle (which is what untestable theories do). “Possibility” describes the situation that in the context of what is know, the hypothetical discovery that X is a fact does not contradict what is known. It is different from “certain”, because you do not yet have the evidence that moves the claim into the category of “certain”. In otherwords, the “possible” describes the non-arbitrary unknown, as I said above. Actually testing a theory via scientific experimentation can just as easily be called “verification”, and verification is a much more appropriate term because the purpose of scientific inquiry is to understand what is, and not what is not (i.e. false).

I don’t doubt that there is an appalling trend to misuse the word “falsifiable”, as part of the general bowdlerization of decent scientifico-epistemological principles in popular culture, at which point the Popperian redefinition of “falsification” will have won the day. But until the victory of the nihilists is complete, it is incumbent on the proponent of redefinition to state clearly what meaning he believes the word to have, and to defend that claim.

29

Science does not work by falsification, ie, the theory that scientific theories must be able to be proven false before they may be accepted as theories.

Science works by induction and deduction.

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If a scientific statement does indeed correctly describe an aspect of the universe, then there never will be any observation which shows that the statement is false. If it is in the nature of the universe that X is a correct description, then it isn’t possible that it is an in correct description, and it is impossible in principle (the principle being the law of the excluded middle).

I did point out that if a theory is true it will obviously pass every test put to it, and I do think that the sentence you quoted should be amended to say something like “For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be possible, if the proposition is not true, in principle to make an observation that would show the proposition to be false.” Now maybe that addition totally perverts whatever the nihilistic view of falsifiability, but that was how I interrpreted what it means for something to be falsifiable. Where instead of violating LEM, the concept of falsifiability would be used to prevent abuses of logic.

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Jennifer has correctly pointed out one of the fundamental flaws in Popper’s emphasis on falsification, that “falsifiable” is being used by Popperians as a special term meaning something other than what it actually means. If theory is “unfalsifiable”, that means it is not possible to show that the theory is false. If a theory is true, then it is impossible to show that it is false, and Popperian epistemology thus encourages evasion of truth rather than embracing of truth.

The fundamental flaw of Popperian scientology is that it encourages embracing the arbitrary – by refusing to distinguish between the true and the arbitrary, and by allowing unjustified arbitrary statements to have the same logical status as truths. Furthermore, a refutation requires that you posit a “known truth”, namely the falsifier – you have to say “this is a true fact, which shows that X is false”. But Popperian logic does not allow you to assert that a statement is true, only that it is “unfalsified”, that you don’t know that it is false. Objectivist epistemology, OTOH, avoids the circularity of Popperianism by distinguishing the true, the false and the arbitrary (although for the purposes of scientific research, you also need to integrate these concepts with “certainty” and “plausibility”).

You don’t seem to be terribly well acquainted with Popper’s ideas about epistemology. Suppose that a scientist can’t find any facts contradicting a particular theory in the solar system, then if he points his telescope elsewhere he may see facts that contradict his theory. for example, until recently astronomers assumed that gas giants could not exist close to stars because they could not form close to stars, but as they have observed gas giants close to stars their theory must be wrong and they are trying to come up with a new theory that accounts for all the facts. Similarly, any theory a scientist holds may be wrong and he may later observe something that refutes his theory. So no finite set of facts can confirm a theory but a finite set of facts can refute a theory as a matter of logic.

Now, a scientist may also wrongly interpret the information he sees in his experiments. For example, scientists are currently embroiled in a debate about whether or not fossils discovered in Flores are Homo sapiens or Homo erectus. At least one of the groups must be wrong. Worse still we see everything very indirectly, light hits our eyes, goes through the lens to the retina and then into the brain. All of the information we have about the world is composed of electrochemical signals in the brain. That information has already been filtered in such a way that it can mislead us about the world. For example, some orange light stays orange when you pass it through a prism but other light splits into red and yellow light, so our eyes conflate these two physically different kinds of light. So all of our ideas about the world are interpretations including experimental results and observations and so on. We actually learn about the world by spotting problems with these interpretations (a clash with experiment or with a more abstract theory), proposing solutions to these problems, criticising these putative solutions and then spotting problems with these new solutions.

Popper argues that science consists of theories that can be subjected to experimental tests. That is, electroweak theory might predict that under certain circumstances we should expect to see a pi meson with such and such a probabilty. If we do not see a pi meson with that probability under those circumstances then electroweak theory would be in trouble. Of course, if we do the experiment our detectors might malfunction or the hardware or software of the computers we use to process the results might fail. Creationism is not scientific because God (if he exists, which I think he doesn’t, but that’s another story) could have made the world any way he liked and so there is no possibility of testing creationism. A theory may be true and still make predictions about what would happen in an experiment that we could test. The General Theory of Relativity might be true and if it is then light going past the Sun will be bent by a certain amount and we might see the effects of that bending. So even if it is true a theory may still be testable and so may still be scientific.

More generally, Popper recommends that we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas. And the reason why we may be wrong is that there is such a thing as objective reality and our ideas may not correspond to it. Critical argument is not arbitrary nor is truth.

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You don’t seem to be terribly well acquainted with Popper’s ideas about epistemology.

Actually, I am, and I reject what he says. To be sure, I agree that a theory which is untestable is not worthy of serious consideration. The common-sense interpretation of his requirement of testablity, as accepted and practiced by scientists, is certainly correct, and in a generous mood, one could say that Popper had an interesting idea which simply need to be worked out in more detail. The devil is in the details, though, and in philosophy, the excuse “but what he (must have) meant” holds no sway. Popper made some significant errors in his epistemology, the most prominent of them being his nihilism – that you cannot know that a claim is true, only that it is false (which means that you cannot know “what is”).

As for the “and later learn that he was wrong” problem, this is covered well by Rand in ITOE and also Peikoff in OPAR, in their discussion of the point that new knowledge does not contradict pervious knowledge.

Worse still we see everything very indirectly, light hits our eyes, goes through the lens to the retina and then into the brain.

I wish I could point you to a web page that would help you, but this is false (I’ll let you do the research if you disbelieve). Light is absorbed by rods and cones in the eye, and that it is, as far as light is concerned. No light in the brain, except during brain survery. You may think I’m being overly picky, but this is one of Popper’s errors: sloppy argumentation which leads to sloppy thinking. I understand that you are really saying that you cannot rely on perception; I disagree, but again the reason is not because I think that we cannot be mistaken in the inferences we make about the nature of things, based on perception. Rather, I reject the implication (as best I can distill it from your statements) that because we do not have infinite precision in our sense organs, that this precludes having actual knowledge about reality (as opposed to speculating about reality).

More generally, Popper recommends that we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas.

That is a major epistemological mistake, on the face of it. Again, this is just the denial of knowledge, the mantra of nihilism. The proper recommendation to a scientist is that existence is primary, the purpose of science is to describe reality, and therefore basic intellectual integrity demands that a person change their conclusions when they are presented with hard evidence from reality that their earlier conclusion is wrong (contradicts reality). I hope you understand the difference.

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QUOTE

Worse still we see everything very indirectly, light hits our eyes, goes through the lens to the retina and then into the brain.

I wish I could point you to a web page that would help you, but this is false (I’ll let you do the research if you disbelieve). Light is absorbed by rods and cones in the eye, and that it is, as far as light is concerned. No light in the brain, except during brain survery. You may think I’m being overly picky, but this is one of Popper’s errors: sloppy argumentation which leads to sloppy thinking. I understand that you are really saying that you cannot rely on perception; I disagree, but again the reason is not because I think that we cannot be mistaken in the inferences we make about the nature of things, based on perception. Rather, I reject the implication (as best I can distill it from your statements) that because we do not have infinite precision in our sense organs, that this precludes having actual knowledge about reality (as opposed to speculating about reality).

You are right, only information filtered by the retina goes into the brain, where it is processed still further. So I understated the indirectness of our knowledge about the world. I do not reject the notion that we can learn about reality. I said that we cannot uncritically assume that our current ideas about reality are right. And I should just like to ask, what properties does knowledge have that theories that scientists have critically discussed and submitted to experimental tests do not have?

QUOTE

More generally, Popper recommends that we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas.

That is a major epistemological mistake, on the face of it. Again, this is just the denial of knowledge, the mantra of nihilism. The proper recommendation to a scientist is that existence is primary, the purpose of science is to describe reality, and therefore basic intellectual integrity demands that a person change their conclusions when they are presented with hard evidence from reality that their earlier conclusion is wrong (contradicts reality). I hope you understand the difference.

I don’t see how it can be a mistake. Scientists want to learn about reality, which somewhat presupposes that they don’t know everything about it.

So I can only conclude that you must have given up on:

(1) Universal scientific theories, i.e. - theories that are attempts by scientists to explain some feature of the whole of reality: Einstein tried to describe gravity across the whole universe with General Relativity, Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists have tried to describe how life evolves across the entire universe and so on.

(2) The correspondence theory of truth, i.e. - a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to reality.

(3) The law of the excluded middle. If you give this up then presumably you think Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity can both describe reality at the same time and so on and so forth. Of course, you would then have destroyed logic altogether and you would not be able to have sensible discussions.

34

You are right, only information filtered by the retina goes into the brain, where it is processed still further. So I understated the indirectness of our knowledge about the world.

These two statements are problematic, and maybe there’s one source of the problem, namely the concept of “direct” vs. “indirect” knowledge. Information doesn’t move from the retina to the brain (maybe some people talk about things that way, but that’s a mistake). Information is something that’s cognitively parsed, meaning that it has been perceived. Physical phenomena like the orbiting of distant planets or the sprouting of a seed in the jungle are not information – they are facts. To be information, it must be a percept (or a representation of a percept). Perception involved brain processing, so until the brain gets involved (and let’s leave open for the moment how involved the brain has to be), it isn’t information. That means that the retina cannot “filter information”. The retina, or tinted glass, can filter a signal, which can influence how a signal is perceived.

The other problem is the idea of indirect knowledge: it simply is wrong, as applied to vision. Perceptual knowledge is direct, and vast amounts of our knowledge is direct (things we see, hear, taste, feel). There are things that we know indirectly through inference, either that there’s a person behind us which we know indirectly because of the shadow that he casts, or say the presence of lead in the blood which we know by using a certain analytical chemical process that results in lines that tell us that there is lead. When you see an apple, you do directly know that there is an apple.

I do not reject the notion that we can learn about reality. I said that we cannot uncritically assume that our current ideas about reality are right.

Of course not, higher-order derived / indirect knowledge is distinct from low order direct perceptual knowledge, but that does not mean we should be paralyzed by doubts about how to interpret a shadow, every time we know we see a person because we have seen their shadow; or, to use something more scientific, every time we stick a thermometer into boiling water or weigh a bunch of stuff.

And I should just like to ask, what properties does knowledge have that theories that scientists have critically discussed and submitted to experimental tests do not have?

I’m sorry, I don’t understand this question.

I don’t see how it can be a mistake. Scientists want to learn about reality, which somewhat presupposes that they don’t know everything about it.

Yes, but this is radically different from what you said before – “we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas”. If a theory is correct, why should we be willing to reject it in favor of some other theory which is wrong? If a theory is right, why should we criticise our ideas? What is wrong with your prescription is that you don’t seem to consider it to be of primary importance to have a reason to reject a theory that is correct, given the context of your knowledge. You should never hold that your theory is wrong, unless there is a concrete reason to believe that it is wrong.

So I can only conclude that you must have given up on:

(1) Universal scientific theories, i.e. - theories that are attempts by scientists to explain some feature of the whole of reality

Nope. Although, the idea of a non-universal universal (“some feature of the whole of reality”) is an interesting concept – do you mean “a statement that is true, in a particular context”?

(2) The correspondence theory of truth, i.e. - a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to reality.

First, there is no such thing as the correspondence theory of truth – there are correspondence theories of truth. The Tarskian version is, AFAICT, wrong, but a non-Platonist version is surely correct. Without me signing any blank checks made out to bad correspondence theories (especially ones based in epistemologies that don’t give proper consideration to what “correspond” means), Objectivist epistemology is a type of CT, so you can safely assume that that’s not something I’ll quickly reject.

(3) The law of the excluded middle.

Get real. That’s beyond serious discussion.

If you give this up then presumably you think Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity can both describe reality at the same time and so on and so forth.

As a matter of fact, both theories of gravity do correctly describe reality in a particular context; what’s important is that our knowledge context has expanded massively since Newton’s day, to the point that we can see that the Newtonian model of gravity incorrectly describes facts that were unknown at that time. We know that Einsteinian gravity fails empirically in certain areas (this leads to some wierdness in modern physics), in the same way that Newtonian gravity failed in the 19th century. Relativistic gravity still fares better than classical gravity. Anyhow, since you struck out on your predictions, I wonder what you conclude from that.

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David Odden: More generally, Popper recommends that we should be willing to consider that any theory we hold might be false and to criticise our ideas.

That is a major epistemological mistake, on the face of it. Again, this is just the denial of knowledge, the mantra of nihilism…

I don’t see how it can be a mistake. Scientists want to learn about reality, which somewhat presupposes that they don’t know everything about it.

The trouble (one trouble, rather) is that Popper’s position comes down to claiming you can’t be sure you know anything certain (and the sense of certain as Popper takes it is important) about reality, regardless of how many experiments you’ve run, never mind how widely and cleverly you’ve set them up. He argues that since what we think we know might be knocked into a cocked hat tomorrow, all we can really say is that a theory hasn’t been falsified yet; perhaps it never will, but that might just be from our looking in the wrong place or the wrong way all the time. As he argues in The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, a large succession of positive results in a wide variety of circumstances does not, as you might naively think, increase the probability of a scientific theory being true. (Mind you, from what I remember of it, his distinction between probability and verifiability is valid.) The obvious rejoinder (and it’s been made for a while) is this: Imagine you have to build a bridge. There are two contractors, one of which has built bridges for a century using the latest engineering knowledge, and they’ve had no failures. The other contractor relies on, say, feng shui and scented candles. They’ve never built a bridge, but they also have never had any failures. Which should you choose? Taking Popper’s pronouncements about falsifiability at face value, it’s a coin toss. If you revolt against that, then you must accept that repeated experiments that don’t falsify a body of theory tell you something about reality.

36

It seems to me that what we’re calling “Falsifiability” is most closely related to tautology. If Falsifiability simply refers to the rejection of tautology as significant, then there’s nothing to argue about, because tautology is inherently insignificant.

37

I heard about this from my control theory professor. A philosopher named Karl Popper (He’s a famous one, as far as I have heard) holds the position that all theories are only ‘true’ until falsified. In fact he hold that theories are not really true, but that they are hypotheses that still need to be taken with a grain of salt.

He also holds that only theories that could be falsified are scientific. Stuff like ‘Intelligent Design’, for example, isn’t.

My problem with this is: This theory cannot be falsified. It has to be taken on faith.

It seems like a twist of Hume’s argument to me: “You can never know the truth, and this is true.”

But he says that if you falsify a theory, then you have to discard it, which is reasonable. But still he adds Hume’s element of uncertainty into it.

Any thoughts?

38

A philosopher named Karl Popper (He’s a famous one, as far as I have heard) holds the position that all theories are only ‘true’ until falsified. In fact he hold that theories are not really true, but that they are hypotheses that still need to be taken with a grain of salt. He also holds that only theories that could be falsified are scientific. Stuff like ‘Intelligent Design’, for example, isn’t.

He held that you cannot verify (show to be true) a universal theory (there is a lot contained in that), only that you saw show that they are false. So no theories are true, they are either false, or unfalsified. This holds of theories that are independent of time ans space: a theory that held of a specific location and time could be tested and if it passes, you would know that it is true.

My problem with this is: This theory cannot be falsified.

He admits this, and doesn’t claim his is a scientific theory (even if it’s a theory about science). That’s why he’s immune to his requirement of falsifiability.

39

My problem with this is: This theory cannot be falsified. It has to be taken on faith.

If that’s your only problem with it, you’re missing the more important point: Popper’s theory isn’t true. There’s no reason to accept. There are absolutely no grounds for concluding that we can only know what’s false and not what’s true.

For a lengthy critical treatment of Popper (which I recall being good but which I haven’t read in years),try this.

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I remember another member bringing up “falsifiability” in another thread, here, nice to know what philosopher is responsible for this silliness.