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Comment by LukeShu | Hacker News Reader

The concept of falsification was introduced by Karl Popper in 1934... not 200 years ago. Popper is a historically important philosopher of science, but under scrutiny much of his thinking doesn't actually match up with how science is done (now or historically), and his philosophy hasn't been the dominant philosophy of science since the 1960s (enter Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos). Nonetheless, the idea that "science = falsification" permeates popular culture, and is even repeated by many scientists who think about their work, but don't as often think about how they think about their work.

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Which ought to be a good reminder that the philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy, not science.

Similarly the problem of induction is a problem for philosophers, not scientists: scientists have a method of doing science that works, and has created a modern world, with all sorts of popular things like televisions and smartphones. However, despite the fact that we’re next door neighbors to philosophy, sometimes borrow their tools, and even have some roots in “natural philosophy,” the best tool we have—the one that makes it all useful to society at large—seems to be the one that their framework says can’t be justified.

When your framework with a long history and lots of proponents seems to indicate that a single little project is not well grounded, that project has a problem. When it seems to indicate that the grand project which underpins all of modern society is not well grounded, the framework has a problem.

Philosophy of science is philosophy, not science. Kuhn, Lakatos, etc, however, muddied the waters a bit by introducing the notion (at least implicitly) that philosophy of science should consider how science is actually practiced, which looks like a scientific approach to me.

I think science and philosophy of science would both improve if there was less separation between the fields. Many, if not most, practicing scientists have a Doctorate of Philosophy in a scientific field, yet none of the graduate programs that I'm aware of require a single course in philosophy of science. Equally problematic, I'm not sure how many philosophers of science have actually taken the time to empirically discover anything.

falsification provides a philosophical underpinning to science, Kuhn's paradigms provide a description of how science actually is done.

If Popper can be boiled down to science = falsification then Kuhn can be boiled down to Science progresses one funeral at a time.

> under scrutiny much of his thinking doesn't actually match up with how science is done (now or historically)

Can you elaborate on this?

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

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

It's kind of like how the modern standards of mathematical "proof" don't extend backwards very well. Nobody would say that Euler wasn't one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, but much of his work was very unrigorous despite being accepted by the math community long before it was formally verified. Similarly there is lots of science that was settled way before it actually made falsifiable predictions which were confirmed through experiment. The classic example is Newtonian physics, which was contradicted by several observations that were only reconciled by Einstein. Another example would be like Boyle's models of gas and liquid. These models all hold approximately, and are very useful (hence their acceptance), but wouldn't really pass the criterion of falsifiability.

Kuhn frames it as "anything goes", which is supposed to be what the horrified scientist utters to themself as they peruse the historical record of their field. Scientists tend to go with "whatever works best" (and whatever secures more funding), rather than following a strictly falsificationist paradigm.

More and better context here: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/the-idea-that-a-sci...

Popper didn't equate science with falsification. That's a gross simplification that's often pushed (I once believed that myself) yet doesn't actually hold up (once you put his thinking under scrutiny)

As a scientist, I'm glad you mention Lakatos, as he described science in a way that is recognizable to practitioners, yet is more philosophical than Kuhn (more a sociologist of science). He significantly impacted how I practice science and evaluate theories (and research programs).

Lakatos is interesting because his philosophy tried to rescue Popper's philosophy in light of Kuhn's arguments, but mutated it considerably in the process.

Popper is more methodology of science, while Kuhn is more protosociology of science. Kuhn’s book doesn’t refute Popper’s, even if he would have liked it to.

I don’t know about the two others, but after reading about them briefly they seem as antirational as any philosophers subscribing to Hegel and/or Marx. When it comes to Lakatos specifically, I can say with certainty that his philosophy of mathematics has so little to do with mathematics that it’s not worth any paper (I studied maths and know many professional mathematicians personally).

Nevertheless falsification is surely the most coherent justification for scientific reasoning in the sense of "a philosophy professor has a gun to your head and demands that you justify your work as a method for approximating reality"?

As philosophy professors often do.

Rarely in practice, but I'd bet they frequently dream of it, not least when the snotty undergrads ask why they should even bother to study philosophy.

No, if anything falsificationism and scientific realism are in tension. From Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

> I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as a system of hypotheses; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipations which in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know that they are ‘true’ or ‘more or less certain’ or even ‘probable’.

The most common realist arguments are probably variations on the "miracle argument": our scientific practices work, and the only plausible explanation is that they have at least some ability to find the truth.

This can be said of all of philosophy (at least outside of the purely formal world of logic), not just the physical sciences. From that perspective, 'standing up to tests' is a poor way to evaluate hypotheses, except in comparison to all the others.

Paying attention to falsification also performs the useful task of pushing hypotheses into saying something definitive.

Science is much more than falsification, of course: for one thing, a falsificationist stance does not generate hypotheses on its own.

I'm not suggesting that all of philosophy should adopt falsification as a principle (and much less that it should be ignored if it cannot): ethics, for example, is a field which I think is important beyond what is falsifiable.

Isn’t that a refutation of justificationism, not of realism? Isn’t he just saying that there’s no process you can follow that will guarantee that you haven’t made a mistake, or similarly, that there are no claims which can reach the status of being beyond criticism?

> "a philosophy professor has a gun to your head and demands that you justify your work as a method for approximating reality"?

You probably won't survive that encounter.

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