Great points. It's one thing to say that a scientific theory
should be falsifiable (as a necessary but not sufficient condition), but the Popperians lose me when they claim either (1) that the only valid scientific study is an attempt at falsification, (2) that corroboration (or in Popperian terms, a failed attempt at falsification) has no significance. Both of these tropes come up in this "response", where Ionides
et al. use them to throw some pretty serious shade at the ASA:
> This approach to the logic of scientific progress, that data can serve to falsify scientific hypotheses but not to demonstrate their truth, was developed by Popper (1959) and has broad acceptance within the scientific community. In the words of Popper (1963), “It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory,” while, “Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability.” The ASA’s statement appears to be contradicting the scientific method described by Einstein and Popper.
However, (1) completely ignores discovery science (something I have ranted about here previously), and implies fully accepting Popper's claim to have solved the centuries-old "problem of induction" [1]. Meanwhile, (2) seems to pop up pretty frequently even though I'm not sure Popper himself would have agreed, considering [2]:
> It is easy, [Popper] argues, to obtain evidence in favour of virtually any theory, and he consequently holds that such ‘corroboration’, as he terms it, should count scientifically only if it is the positive result of a genuinely ‘risky’ prediction
Ionides et al. conveniently left out the second half of that context. Hmm, if only there were some sort of way to quantify that "riskiness". Like some sort of theorem... maybe of the form P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/