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> Popper is immensely influential in science, well worth a closer study Yep, pretty much invented the falsification principle. Imagine a time when scientists o
by gboudrias 8y ago
> Popper is immensely influential in science, well worth a closer study
Yep, pretty much invented the falsification principle. Imagine a time when scientists often tried to prove things true. That was science before Popper. This makes him the greatest contributor to science that I know of since Francis Bacon.
- foldr 8y ago>Imagine a time when scientists often tried to prove things true The philosophers of science that Popper was criticizing didn't think that scientists should try to prove that theories were true. They thought that scientists should try to show that theories were likely to be true given the available evidence. Popper was a radical skeptic regarding epistemic probability, and thought that it was impossible to probabilistically confirm scientific theories.
- gboudrias 8y agoWell, yes, fair enough. But the main point is that scientific progress was greatly accelerated thereafter. In that sense there is a before and after him, and anyone who would choose to be anti-Popper (nowadays) is generally an epistemic relativist who doesn't believe in the idea of progress, or sometimes even the scientific enterprise, at all.
- foldr 8y agoMost philosophers of science think that Popper was fundamentally wrong about induction and demarcation, but few of them are epistemic relativists.
- gboudrias 8y agoAfter some research, I understand that falsification is not seen as a sufficient criteria for demarcation as Popper probably saw it. But do you not agree that the idea of falsification as a bare minimum was revolutionary? That was the main point of my original comment. Apologies to anyone I might have offended by accidentally bundling them with relativists.