Joel has repeatedly stated in this forum that good Science proceeds by refutation rather than by induction. This statement is as false as many of his other statements. The idea of falsification in Science was made popular by Sir Karl Popper, an eccentric British philosopher of Science. Most scientists and philosophers now believe that this idea was fundamentally a flawed and eccentric idea. It is widely accepted that the greatest advances in Science have come from induction and confirmation. The theory of gravitation, evolution, genetics, special and general relativity, quantum Physics and structure of DNA have all been great inductive insights from limited initial observations, whose validity has grown stronger with each new confirming instance.
Martin Gardner, a brilliant science writer had recently written a beautiful article about the demise of Popper's falsification fantasy in the journal "Skeptical Inquirer". He concluded this article by saying: "Popper's great and tireless efforts to expunge the word induction from scientific and philosophical discourse has utterly failed. Except for a small but noisy group of British Popperians, induction is just too firmly embedded in the way philosophers of science and even ordinary people talk and think. Confirming instances underlie our beliefs that the Sun will rise tomorrow, that dropped objects will fall, that water will freeze and boil, and a million other events. It is hard to think of another philosophical battle so decisively lost." I give below a few other excerpts from this article: "A SKEPTICAL LOOK AT KARL POPPER by Martin Gardner Sir Karl Popper, who died in 1994, was widely regarded as England's greatest philosopher of science since Bertrand Russell. Indeed a philosopher of worldwide eminence. Today his followers among philosophers of science are a diminishing minority, convinced that Popper's vast reputation is enormously inflated. I agree. I believe that Popper's reputation was based mainly on this persistent but misguided efforts to restate common-sense views in a novel language that is rapidly becoming out of fashion." "Popper recognized � but dismissed as unimportant � that every falsification of a conjecture is simultaneously a confirmation of an opposite conjecture, and every conforming instance of a conjecture is a falsification of an opposite conjecture. To scientists and philosophers outside the Popperian fold, science operates mainly by induction (confirmation), and also and less often by disconfirmation (falsification). Its language is almost always one of induction. If Popper bet on a certain horse to win a race, and the horse won, you would not expect him to shout, "Great! My horse failed to lose!" "Ernest Nagel, Columbia University's famous philosopher of science, in his Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science (1979), summed it up this way: "[Popper's] conception of the role of falsification . . . is an oversimplification that is close to being a caricature of scientific procedures."" "It's not so much that Popper disagreed with Carnap and other inductivists as that he restated their views in a bizarre and cumbersome terminology. When Popper wrote "Logik der Forschung," he was barely thirty. Despite its flawed center, it was full of good ideas, from perhaps the most brilliant of the bright young philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle. But where the others continued to learn, develop and in time exert a lasting influence on the philosophical tradition, Popper knew better. He refused to revise his falsificationism, and so condemned himself to a lifetime in the service of a bad idea." Cheers, Santosh =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-W-E-B---S-I-T-E-=-=- To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from GoaNet | http://www.goacom.com/goanet ================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dont want so many e=mails? Join GoaNet-Digest instead ! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Help support non-commercial projects in Goa by advertizing!! * * * * Your ad here !!
