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Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science. It leads to the apparently paradoxical idea that a proposition cannot be true and meaningful unless it can also be shown to be false.
Before we can claim a proposition is true, it must be falsifiable (unless it is a meaningless tautology like "The cat is on the mat or the cat is not on the mat"). For a proposition to be falsifiable, it must be possible to make an observation or statement that would show the proposition to be false. For example, the proposition "All crows are black" would be falsified by observing one red crow.
Any theory not falsifiable is said to be unscientific, unverifiable, pure ideology, nonsense or meaningless. Psychoanalytic theory, for example, is held up by followers of Popper as an example of an ideology rather than a science. A patient regarded by his psychoanalyst as "in denial" about his sexual orientation might be viewed as confirming he is homosexual because he denies that he is. If he has sex with women, the patient is showing how desperate he is to buttress his denials. In other words, there is no way the patient could convincingly demonstrate his heterosexuality. This is an example of what Popper called a "closed circle". The proposition that the patient is homosexual is not falsifiable.
Falsifiability was first developed by Karl Popper in the 1930s. Popper noticed that two types of statements are of particular value to scientists. The first are statements of observations, such as 'this is a white swan'. Logicians call these statements singular existential statements, since they assert the existence of some particular thing. They can be parsed in the form: There is an x which is a swan and is white.
The second type of statement of interest to scientists categorizes all instances of something, for example "All swans are white". Logicians call these statements universal. They are usually parsed in the form For all x, if x is a swan then x is white.
Scientific "laws" (more properly termed theories) are commonly supposed to be of this form. Perhaps the most difficult question in the methodology of science is: how does one move from observations to theories? How can one validly infer a universal statement from any number of existential statements?
Inductivist methodology supposed that one can somehow move from a series of singular existential statements to a universal statement. That is, that one can move from ‘this is a white swan', “that is a white swan”, and so on, to a universal statement such as 'all swans are white'. This method is clearly logically invalid, since it is always possible that there may be a non-white swan that has somehow avoided observation. Yet some philosophers of science claim that science is based on such an inductive method.Popper held that science could not be grounded on such an invalid inference. He proposed falsification as a solution to the problem of induction. Popper noticed that although a singular existential statement such as 'there is a white swan' cannot be used to affirm a universal statement, it can be used to show that one is false: the singular existential observation of a black swan serves to show that the universal statement 'all swans are white' is false. In logic this is modus tollens. 'There is a black swan' implies 'there is a non-white swan' which in turn implies 'there is something which is a swan and which is not white'.
Although the logic of naïve falsification is valid, it is rather limited. Popper drew attention to these limitations in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in response to anticipated criticism from Duhem and CarnapRudolf Carnap ( May 18, 1891 September 14, 1970) was a German philosopher. He was born in Ronsdorf and educated at the Gymnasium of Barmen and the University of Freiburg. At university he studied physics, mathematics and, under Bruno Bauch, philosophy.. W. V. QuineWillard Van Orman Quine ( June 25, 1908 December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. Overview Sometimes referred to as the "philosopher's philosopher", Quine is the quintessential model of an is also well-known for his observation in his influential essay, " Two Dogmas of EmpiricismQuines paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism published 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of twentieth century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central parts of the logical positivists philosophy. One is the distinction" (which is reprinted in From a Logical Point of View), that nearly any statement can be made to fit with the data, so long as one makes the requisite "compensatory adjustments." In order to logically falsify a universal, one must find a true falsifying singular statement. But Popper pointed out that it is always possible to change the universal statement or the existential statement so that falsification does not occur. On hearing that a black swan has been observed in Australia, one might introduce ad hocAd hoc is a Latin phrase which means "for this [purpose]. It generally signifies a solution that has been tailored to a specific purpose, such as a tailor-made suit, a handcrafted network protocol, and specific-purpose equation and things like that. Ad-ho hypothesis, 'all swans are white except those found in Australia'; or one might adopt another, more skeptical about some observers, 'Australian ornithologists are incompetent'. As Popper put it, a decision is required on the part of the scientist to accept or reject the statements that go to make up a theory or that might falsify it. At some point, the weight of the ad hoc hypotheses and disregarded falsifying observations will become so great that it becomes unreasonable to support the base theory any longer, and a decision will be made to reject it.
In place of naïve falsification, Popper envisioned science as evolving by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories which can account for the phenomena which falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power. Thus, Aristotelian mechanicsAristotle ( Greek Αριστοτλης Aristotelēs) ( 384 BCE March 7, 322 BCE) was a Greek scientist and philosopher. Along with Plato, he is often considered to be one of the two most influential philo explained observations of objects in everyday situations, but was falsified by GalileoGalileo Galilei ( Pisa, February 15, 1564 Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscan astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His great achievements include perfecting the telescope, a variety of astron’s experiments, and was itself replaced by Newtonian which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. Or at least most of them; the motion of Mercury wasn't predicted by Newtonian mechanics, but was by Einstein's General Relativity. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous ether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in its turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment, whose results were eventually understood as incompatible with an ether and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the new phenomena. At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found which had greater 'explanatory power' (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.
Naïve falsificationism is an unsuccessful attempt to prescribe a rationally unavoidable method for science. Falsificationism proper, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice.
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