falsifying the idea of falsification

[Belacqua]

Hope it wasn't boring... LoL

Not at all! It's a pleasure to see someone make a case, with quotes and links. There's way too many posts that just say, "Wrong, stupid." 

I'm not knowledgable enough to evaluate what he said about the need to rethink evolution. Naturally it's a mine field, because anyone who said "maybe we should look again" would stimulate the creationists to jump to conclusions. I see it as one of the most important goals of philosophy, however, to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we do, and that what people hold to be true is likely to change more than we can currently imagine (if we don't wipe out the whole planet first). Some people look down on philosophy because it doesn't seem to offer practical benefits, but I don't see that as its job. It's more about keeping us uncertain -- or being very strict about where certainty isn't warranted -- and Popper was good at that. 

The case of contrasting Einstein with Freud is really instructive. I'm a big fan of Freud, and while Popper was certainly right in saying that Freud's theories aren't science, this is for me part of their charm. Again, they force uncertainty on us, which is a good thing. 

This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia:

For Popper, however, to assert that a theory is unscientific, is not necessarily to hold that it is unenlightening, still less that it is meaningless, for it sometimes happens that a theory which is unscientific (because it is unfalsifiable) at a given time may become falsifiable, and thus scientific, with the development of technology, or with the further articulation and refinement of the theory. Further, even purely mythogenic explanations have performed a valuable function in the past in expediting our understanding of the nature of reality.

I'm a big fan of the "mythogenic." So I'm pleased to see that for Popper, calling something unscientific isn't calling it worthless. He was a broad-minded thinker.