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Old 13-July-2004, 04:21 AM
beskeptical beskeptical is offline
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From Mr Popper himself, (see link above).
Quote:
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.

(1) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations.

(2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions;that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory-an event which would have refuted the theory.

(3) Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
(4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of theory (as people often think) but a vice.

(5) Every genuine testof a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability; some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

(6) Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of agenuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of"corroborating evidence.")

(7) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers-for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionaliststratagem. ")

One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
I think I've been following these guidelines in my thought process. I notice first that the discussion by Popper is re theory, not just process. That clears it up a bit for me in that regard. Second, his summary of falsifiability includes both refutability and testibility. I take his point to mean testing a theory needs to include some criteria that gives a more vigorous answer than all tests might give. And, finally, I don't see falsifiability as defining all aspects of what is and what isn't scientific, because science has more parts to it than theory. I myself deal with a lot of the more basic stuff...risk benefit of vaccines based on evidence...stuff like that.

Well, I shall await other comments on the above and go read another link that google turned up when I put in 'falsifiability and science', "The Case Against God: Science and the Falsifiability Question in Theology". Hmmm.
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