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It's more about deductive vs. inductive reasoning, rather than whether past results matter. Popper distinguished science from non-science by falsifiability: if
by GavinMcG 4y ago
It's more about deductive vs. inductive reasoning, rather than whether past results matter.
Popper distinguished science from non-science by falsifiability: if a prediction could theoretically be disproved, it's a scientific one. New information is often useless, because new information can never prove a claim—the only useful information is disproof. On a larger scale, models that turn out to make false predictions are either altered or abandoned. It's all well and good to look at past results and make predictions, but Popper's point was that there can be plenty of models that are consistent with past results and there's no way of choosing between them until they're winnowed down through falsification.
Bayesianism acknowledges that you can't necessarily pick one right explanation, but it tries to account for that by statistically weighting models, and with new information the distribution/weighting is updated.
(This explanation is a gloss, of course, and so necessarily an incorrect model. But hopefully a helpful one.)
- mirceal 4y agoPopper was a cool guy and his ideas on falsifiability definitely moved the needle and gave us a robust scientific method. But… what do you do when you no longer can directly measure or even worse: the measurements impact the state of the system you are trying to observe? I think for things like quantum mechanics and other areas that are hard to observe directly (neuroscience comes to mind) there has to be a revision of how Popper’s principles are applied.
- GavinMcG 4y agoThat revision is probably expressed in Lakatos's view on "research programmes" that may have core non-falsifiable theories and that continue being useful even when scientists know something is off about the model as a whole: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#ImprPoppScie https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#ImprPoppScie
- raldi 4y agoPopper: The statement, "There are no purple cows", can never be proven, but it could be disproven by presenting one. Fuchs: [Need some help with this one] Deutsch: [This one too] Yudkowsky: Based on the fact that we've studied cows all over the planet for millennia, and have never seen a verified report of a purple one, we can conclude with great certainty that there are no purple ones.