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The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to b
by noego 7y ago
The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to be frank.
I imagine a big appeal of falsifiability in its early days, stemmed from its opposition to religious dogma. Imagine dealing with someone whose answer to every question comes back to God. "Why did the patient die?" "Because God decreed it." Talking about germ-theory must have been a massive improvement over theology, hence why ideas like falsifiability must have arisen to provoke people to think in more critical ways.
My own standard for evaluating theories comes down to the following: The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful predictions for the future.
"Simplest" because we need to prevent overfitting.
"Fits existing data" because the whole point of a theory is to explain what we see around us.
And "useful predictions" because it will actually provide practical benefit to us. As opposed to a theory like "God decreed it", which may be extremely simple and error-free, but provides us with no practical benefit at all.
As I see it, falsifiability is a side-effect of the second and third requirements. If a theory is making useful predictions, we might as well check to see if it's accurate. And if it's not, there's no point in holding on to a theory that's making faulty predictions. Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful and fit any data at hand.
- thethirdone 7y ago> The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful predictions for the future. My main issue with that definition is what makes it a useful prediction. Does a theory (for particle physics) that predicts the Higgs Boson more useful than one that didn't? If not, then before we collected the data to reject other theories they all would have been equal. I would rather suggest that the properties of a good theory are best fitting existing data and having specific predictions for future measurements. > Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful. If you are of the opinion that any good theory is falsifiable (in the sense described in the article), then presumably you disagree with the rejection of falsifiability in the article. Where would you say the error in logic in the article is?
- gliop 7y agoA useful prediction is a prediction that matches experimental results.
- thethirdone 7y agoYou can't possibly know what will match experimental results in the future so that doesn't help determine good theories in the present. And I would say that Newtonian gravity was a useful theory despite not matching experimental currently because when it was the best it mostly explained observations.
- chii 7y ago> Newtonian gravity was a useful theory despite not matching experiment "Useful" in this context means useful for a future theory or experimentation, not utility. Newtonian theory certainly predicted many results, and all of them were useful in the above sense. A prediction doesn't have to exactly match observations to be useful, but that the theory produces a prediction which _could_ be tested against. Even flat-earth theory makes useful predictions - albeit already proven false as time and time again, it predicts the wrong results. What isn't useful is an unfalsifiable theory, which means the predictions it makes is not able to be tested, or the results of such a test could be construed to match if you squint a bit. A theory like creationism, for example.
- thethirdone 7y agoI am a bit confused by your comment. I'm not sure if you agree with gliop or not. I am simply saying that Newtonian gravity is useful (in pretty much any sense) and that it did not match all experiments. Particularly in the orbit of Mercury could not be explained. > Even flat-earth theory makes useful predictions - albeit already proven false as time and time again, it predicts the wrong results. I definitely agree usefulness is independent of fitting experimental data. gliop would seem to say flat earth theories are not useful.
- 7y ago
- avindroth 7y agohttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-bel...
- FabHK 7y ago> The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to be frank. That's not the purpose of the article, though. The purpose is to show that the most popular purported solution to the problem (naive falsificationism) is so severely limited as to be untenable, and that's really useful in itself. The title is "Why falsificationism is false", not "What should replace falsificationism".
- coldtea 7y ago>I imagine a big appeal of falsifiability in its early days, stemmed from its opposition to religious dogma. Imagine dealing with someone whose answer to every question comes back to God. "Why did the patient die?" "Because God decreed it." Talking about germ-theory must have been a massive improvement over theology, hence why ideas like falsifiability must have arisen to provoke people to think in more critical ways. Only better answers than "Because God decreed it." were known and handled, by philosophers and early scientists, even by thelogicians, since antiquity. And there were tons of nuanced epistemologies (that included practical falsifiability) by the time Popper came up with his idea already.