I for one am very much interested in your answers. You’ve said that faslifiablility is not a requirenment for a valid hypothesis in science. Do you see any requirements for a valid hypothesis?
Maybe you can give me some of the history. I have heard that there were battles between Kuhn and Popper over something like this issue.
Let me provide some brief exposition (cursory really). Some philosophers of science, Popper in particular were looking for a sort of litmus test - a set of neat and tidy rules to filter what is science from what is not. In part Popper was motivated by a desire to expose certain fields of study such as psychoanalysis and certain Marxist claims as pseudoscience. It was also motivated by a sense that the Copenhagen Interpretation and Instrumentalism had departed the purview of science and invaded the turf of philosophy. It didn’t help that on some levels Bohr and Heisenberg probably did depart science and make what can only be considered philosophical statements. Heisenberg for example stated that the moon does not exist if no one is looking at it. (Copenhagen Interpretation and Instrumentalism are big topics in and of themselves, but can sloppily be summarized: Reality is a meaningless concept for science; just get the math to work out right.)
So Popper, influenced by the Hegelian school, was the among the first and most prominent philosophers of science to attempt a litmus test for science. Falsifiability was a central feature of the boundaries he attempted to set. It didn’t take long before scientists and other philosophers objected. Scientists do routinely form hypotheses that are not falsifiable, such as the previous example of the super heavy island. Philosophers of science, Popper foremost soon added the role of confirmation. Although we cannot falsify the super heavy island hypothesis, we can confirm it by producing one of the predicted atoms. This too led to problems. Consider the hypothesis, “all chemicals have a temperature and pressure range in which they are liquid.” How can this be falsified? Suppose we could not make one stubborn chemical into a liquid. We still have not falsified the hypothesis because there are infinite combination of temperature and pressure ranges. How can the hypothesis be confirmed? Can we ever be sure we have discovered and tested every chemical (this is the classic problem of induction elucidated so well by Hume et al)? Yet the hypothesis not only seems to be well within the realm of science, it seems to be correct.
So eventually the role of conditionality and self-correction came into play. What separates science from pseudoscience and religion, said some philosophers, is that science considers all of its constructs conditional, subject to correction and improvement. There are many problems here, but two are most glaring. First, who’s to say for sure a correction is really an improvement? We were wrong the first time, maybe we’re just as wrong with the correction. Second, pseudoscience and religion can and do self-correct. Popper argued that it was a different type of correction, but for all intents and purposes admitted that it was a subjective evaluation.
I wish I could find the quote, but eventually Popper poetically summed up his frustration trying to find a neat and tidy answer to what is scientific. He basically claimed that science needs its magic too, but that it is fundamentally different from the magic of pseudoscience or religion.
Validation? Falsification? I think Kuhn argued “none of he above.” Kuhn saw no “scientific method” looking at the history of science.
Khun did argue this and I think he is completely correct. He did; however, provide some guidelines to what constitutes a good scientific theory. Some of key guidelines include predictive power, accuracy, and consistency. Unlike Popper, Khun presents his guidelines as helpful indicators, not a litmus test.
I recently read his “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and found it to be consistent with pragmatism. Within the current scientific paradigm could we still say that there is a method?
That is a good read. Given that even Popper used the term “magic” to describe the creative process of science, I don’t think we can say there is a scientific method that could be reduced to neat and tidy rules. After all, science (at least research as opposed to education or practice of it) is more about what we don’t know than what we do know. It would be very limiting indeed to confine the creative discovery process to such and such rules.
Thanks for the reply. Let me know if you have any more thoughts on the issue.
