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>Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is
by eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers.
That doesn't really mean Popper is wrong.
- pmoriarty 10y agoLet me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified? If it can't then by its own measure, it's not "scientific". Further, if one scorns anything "unscientific" as valueless, then the principle of falsifiability must also be valueless.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>Let me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified? In the relevant sense, yes. We switch out conceptual definitions when they fail to encompass the relevant empirical instances. If falsifiability turned out to allow, for example, theology to be considered a science, then we would have to throw out falsifiability. As it is, it's only a coarse-grained principle for demarcation, hence the arguments about string theory.