Quote:
Originally Posted by Ari Jokimaki
And with the thing I'm suggesting, we wouldn't concentrate so much on going from falsifiable hypothesis to falsifiable hypothesis, we would concentrate more on making observations than making theories. Falsifiability wouldn't be so important in that setting, but would only have a minor role.
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But one must avoid falling into what might be called "google science", where you skip the organizational principles and just search over observational results. You could certainly do science that way-- observations would still be motivated by any absence in the database, and predictions would be possible via interpolation. But one of the key goals of science would be lacking-- the goal of achieving simplification and understanding of our complex reality.
This is what I get exercised about when I hear people (like Wolfram) argue that science has gotten too hard for our brains and needs to be turned over to computers. Science was always too hard for our brains-- the whole goal was to find ways to make it not too hard for our brains. That was always the toughest challenge in science, was Newton's genius, and continues to be our charge today-- even if it's not easy.
But Ari's point does raise an interesting point about falsification, which connects with the whole issue of what a theory is for. We can't decide if a theory is "alive" or "dead" until we recognize its
purpose, and the purpose is often not to achieve arbitrarily accurate predictions-- it might be to help us understand something at a useful but not unlimited level of precision. In other words, it doesn't need to be "the last word", and so "falsification" is not cut-and-dried.