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claudiawerner | 2 years ago

There are citations both for and against falsificationism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[0]; quoting:

"Popper’s demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science (Hansson 2006) and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific (Agassi 1991; Mahner 2007, 518–519). Strictly speaking, his criterion excludes the possibility that there can be a pseudoscientific claim that is refutable. According to Larry Laudan (1983, 121), it “has the untoward consequence of countenancing as ‘scientific’ every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions”"

From the citation on Hansson, the abstract[1] reads:

"...Furthermore, an empirical study of falsification in science is reported, based on the 70 scientific contributions that were published as articles in Nature in 2000. Only one of these articles conformed to the falsificationist recipe for successful science, namely the falsification of a hypothesis that is more accessible to falsification than to verification."

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals

[1] https://philpapers.org/rec/HANFF

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jessenichols|2 years ago

Popper's criterion in a vacuum could seem to be exclusionary, but his philosophy of science involves his underrated idea of evolutionary epistemology. That all theories, seemingly pseudoscientific and the rest, compete to explain something, testable or not. Explanation is the most fundamental aspect, the rival statements compete to solve some problem in terms of how and why.

Read Popper's Ch. 1. Conjectural Knowledge: My Solution of the Problem of Induction https://roamresearch.com/#/app/infinitedays/page/tGbhrzsPK