Falsifiability is a stupid criterion

[Categories+Sheaves]

Read before flaming:

Pardon the provocative title. Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion isn't plainly bad or anything like that... It's popular for a very good reason: it's a single word that gets right at the heart of how we want science to function. But it seems like all the online-atheist-community folks I come across don't think too hard about what we mean with this phrase... well, maybe some folks do, but most of the time they're doing it wrong...

Okay, okay, so what's my point? I have two gripes about the use of falsification:
1. This criterion has a lot more holes in it than people seem to acknowledge
2. Paradigmatic characterizations of science are a lot more tenable, and need more love

There's some very sound criticism of Popper's criterion (via Kuhn, in his book, linked below) and I'll leave him to argue his own arguments (read it!). I'm taking a... more scattershot approach, since I don't want this post to be the length of a book.

My "short" argument: Our standards for interpreting evidence, our standards of what constitutes proof, and even our standards for the importance of an experiment are all occurring prior to any statement like, "Evidence X will force me to relinquish supposition A". Every falsification-check occurs within an ocean of unexamined presuppositions, and in most discussions where this is pointed out, the pro-science person (whose opponent usually has their head fully up their ass, e.g. presuppository apologetics) has to nuke the issue. with something like "Even if our suppositions are wrong, we aggresively look for ways to discover their wrongness.. are you able to do this?" And that's a fair defense ...

But when the debate is over, we should be able to sit down examine how these unexamined preuppositions function in science--and I don't mean by picking up some pop-pscyh book about how our subconscious runs most of our lives.

"A wee bit longer" arguments from better-educated folk:
Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start. (in case you want my coordinates: my thinking is most in line with Lakatos' "research program" business)
Kuhn's book is the reason why 'paradigm' has its current place in our vernacular.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Wxn1L9E...32DBC7CA58 <--Giorgio Agamben talks a lot on what a paradigm is (mainly via Foucault, but it's still relevant/interesting).
And a side note: How do I link youtube video without embedding them on this site?

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Well... let's see what sort of responses we get...

[The Grand Nudger]

Falsifiability is a wonderful criterion -in addition with all the others we use- for determining what we can say we "know".

For example:

I took a shit this morning at 5:55 AM, and then the sun rose. I propose that the sun rises directly after I take a shit. Now, I've repeated this experiment over and over, it always works, there isn't a single point of dissenting data. I guess that settles it, unless there might be some way to refine my theory.....

Onwards and upwards. Would you care to point out an un-examined presupposition in science? What is it that you feel is being taken for granted?

[Angrboda]

It's morning, so you're not going to get anything incredibly coherent from my direction, but FWIW. (And I have someone waiting, so I don't have time to properly proof and edit this; mea culpa.)

I haven't read Kuhn except in the secondary literature, so I can't really comment on that. I do think, however, that there is a conflict between falsifiabilty as a criterion for science and how most people think about truth and knowledge. I conjectured with some support that most people naively operate using what is known as a correspondance theory of truth. A correspondance theory of truth is a theory that what makes a statement or proposition "true" is that there is a fact of the world that "corresponds" to the fact expressed by the statement. (E.g. The statement "all swans are white" is true only if the swans that exist in the world are colored white.) This seems a natural and intuitively correct way to view things. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of philosophers known as the Vienna circle set the tone of thinking about the philosophy of science and other things. One of their notions, verifibility, grew into its own major philosophical position known as logical positviism (whihch in turn greatly influenced Ayn Rand and Objectivism). Verificationism and logical positivism assert that the truth of a theory is measured in how well confirmed that theory is, how many observations appear tot validate the thory, and, that only propositions that are and can be verified this way express "truths" that have any real meaning; "facts" or theories that can't be verified, are on this view meaningless. Now I won't go into detail on the philosophical problems with this view other than to make the common observation that this view tends to strengthen the problems in human psychology known as confirmation bias, the human tendency to only look at things that agree with our view, and ignore or minimize those that don't.

Well, how is this a problem? Well, when verification was the standard of how one determines the utility of a hypothesis and whether it is true or not, there wasn't much problem. Truth consisted in pairing up statements about the world with facts about the world that match that statement. And verificationism made that the gold standard by asserting that what made a scientific theory meangingful and valid was how well it lent itself to being confirmed by finding observations which appeared to pair what was observed with what the theory suggested we should expect to observe. The theory of what made good science, and the theory of what made statements true (correspondance) fit together hand and glove. Popper and others changed that by introducing notions such as falsifiability as the criterion by which the quality and meaningfulness of scientific theories are judged. However, people did not change their notions about truth, that truth is correspondance between statement or theory, and a fact in the world. So people's ideas about the fruits of science, that it produces statements which correspond with or describe facts of the world, is in some sense mismatched with the current epistemology, philosophy and practice of science.

I can't claim to understand what this means in practical or philosophical terms, nor do I really understand how to characterize the understandings of science in a philosophical way as a theory of truth, a statement about how science and scientific statements are judged in terms of truth content. What I will say, however, is that there appears to be a mismatch between what people in general (and many scientists) believe that scientific statements are saying, what they mean, and the current philosophy about what having a good, falsifiable but not yet falsified theory means in terms of notions about its "truth" and "validity". People still expect science to confirm theories, but it's not at all clear that science is doing this, can do this, or even should do this. (The other side is a view that the "truth" of a scientific theory is embodied by how useful the theory is; that if a theory leads to the production of useful technological goods, that is a measure of how true that theory is. I'm not going to go into that aspect here.)

[The Grand Nudger]

Truth as a concept is often taken as absolute while truth in practice (and especially so in science) is often an approximation. Falsifiability and verification, like any tools, have pros and cons. One without the other may be very strong in specific circumstances but overall their value is greatly increased by being paired with each other. Consider for a moment if I asked you to assemble a kit airplane with a screwdriver. A herculean task. How about a screwdriver and wrench? As we add tools the task becomes more manageable. On the other hand, some tools have no use for a given task, in the example above, if I were to add a rubber chicken as a tool I doubt that your workload would decrease, or your ability to complete the task would increase. As far as how people perceive science and truth, there are probably plenty of people that think science is saying "this is completely true" when it's more akin to "this isn't completely wrong"...lol.

It is an amusing thing to ponder over though, the times we've gotten the answer right and the steps wrong, steps right-answer wrong, or whether or not any of these tools we use are actually good at what they do -or we just happen to be incredibly lucky- stumbling upon "the answers" while we hold onto tools which aren't actually doing anything at all.

[Categories+Sheaves]

Truth as a concept is often taken as absolute while truth in practice (and especially so in science) is often an approximation. Falsifiability and verification, like any tools, have pros and cons... ...As far as how people perceive science and truth, there are probably plenty of people that think science is saying "this is completely true" when it's more akin to "this isn't completely wrong"...lol.

It is an amusing thing to ponder over though, the times we've gotten the answer right and the steps wrong, steps right-answer wrong, or whether or not any of these tools we use are actually good at what they do -or we just happen to be incredibly lucky- stumbling upon "the answers" while we hold onto tools which aren't actually doing anything at all.

I'm on an Asus surf in a hotel that has shitty internet, so I'm holding off on writing a more thorough response until I'm back home with a real computer.
But a sketchy response:
-It's not so much that unexamined presuppositions are a problem, it's that they play an integral part of how we conduct ourselves, and our holding them doesn't really jive with that falsifiability shtick.
-Beliefs aren't falsifiable on their own; it's only within the context of 'stronger' beliefs/conclusions that hypothesis A can be 'tested' in some sense. Given this, shouldn't we turn our attention towards how aggregates of beliefs function?
-It's convenient that you used the 'building an airplane' example: another part of my beef is that choosing between belief A and belief B(in the case of falsifiability, the choice is between A and not-A) is driven by pragmatism rather than some proximity to the truth of things 'in themselves'. Falsifiability hints at this sort of valuation (Popper wanted 'bold' statements that allowed us to insist that the world behaves in manner A and never Manner B, and doesn't this function as a guarantee that we will have the opportunities afforded by A?) but doesn't go far enough in insisting that the beliefs exist from and in relation to our pragmatic functioning (I'm reaching for Heidegger here...)

bleh cant edit... Gotta go get dinner...

[liam]

Falsifiability is the ONLY deductive criterion available to science. Let's have a quick run through of what you corectly called a 'sketchy' argument.

- x is important in daily life, therefore x is true }Nope, logical fallacy. It does hold, go read Bertrand Russell's problems of philosophy, the section on probable opinion is what you are searching for here. Let me sum it up because I doubt you will go read it: Nope, induction doesn't prove anything but then again it doesn't need to because we're only living life by what we predict, not what we know.
- Not true, if hypothesis A is that nothing outside of the earth's atmosphere would move (Aristotle) then it only takes one occurance to the contrary for this to be disproven, in this case the proof is followed by the belief, not the way you propose it.
- Popper simply wanted hypothetico-deduction in science and in society in general as this was greater evidence than the classical hypothetico-inductive method. This is simple yes or no knowledge and to dillute it down into simply complications over what he 'hinted at' is pure bullshit. Popper advocated AV¬A logic, this is good logic (learn prop. calculus, -A is the opposite, not the negation, that's just confusing and 'not-A' is ¬his opinion) and determines truth from falsehood.

No personal dig intended but you sound like you've literally just finished reading into the popper/kuhn philosophy of science for A2 sociology and now you're getting rowdy, may be wrong but it seems strongly probable. Willing to be proven wrong (or falsified if you will (love the irony))

[CliveStaples]

Falsifiability is the ONLY deductive criterion available to science.

I eagerly await C&S's responses in this thread.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm still wondering which unexamined presuppositions that form an integral part of how we conduct ourselves (thought it was science a minute ago, but meh) bother you.

Falsifiability does hint at pragmatism, we do value things pragmatically. Science is itself a massive undertaking in the pragmatic application of thought....."I have this big brain and I'm surrounded by stuff, lets see what I can do with this". It just so happens that the "truth" of things is often very useful. We're playing pretty loose with our words at this point, but I'm guessing that if we didn't you wouldn't have much to disagree with..lol.

[Anomalocaris]

Actually, falsifiability isn't the only deductive criterion available to science, there is also verifiability. Were verifiability not also an deducive criterion acceptable to science when more stringent falsifiability criterion was not possible to be applied, there would have been essentially no science before early 20th century, and vital parts integral to many fields in modern science, like astronomy, sociology, etc, still won't be considered science.

The point is falsifiability is a more stringent standard then verifiability, and the stringency impose requirements that is often difficult to meet when dealing with complex systems that is difficult to control.

However, nothing vital to christainity could even pretend to meeting the most slack possible application of verifiability, much less falsifiability.

[libalchris]

My "short" argument: Our standards for interpreting evidence, our standards of what constitutes proof, and even our standards for the importance of an experiment are all occurring prior to any statement like, "Evidence X will force me to relinquish supposition A". Every falsification-check occurs within an ocean of unexamined presuppositions, and in most discussions where this is pointed out, the pro-science person (whose opponent usually has their head fully up their ass, e.g. presuppository apologetics) has to nuke the issue. with something like "Even if our suppositions are wrong, we aggresively look for ways to discover their wrongness.. are you able to do this?" And that's a fair defense ...

But when the debate is over, we should be able to sit down examine how these unexamined preuppositions function in science--and I don't mean by picking up some pop-pscyh book about how our subconscious runs most of our lives.

If I understand you correctly I'm going to say no. Science doesn't base falsification-checks and validations on presuppositions, it bases them on observations. Sometimes observations turn out to be wrong, but that's why scientists always try to independently verify observations before drawing any conclusions.

Maybe if you gave an example I could understand you better. Give an example of a test for a theory involving presuppositions.