[phil of sci, psych] Falsifiability?
What does, in the Popperian sense, falsifiability mean.... really?
I haven't read Popper, but as a good little geek I've sure heard of him -- between the science background and the atheism background, you can't miss the notion of falsifiability being the bedrock of what constitutes science.
It's sure a nice idea. Very handy. But something has bothered me about it for a long time, in the back of my mind. This got pulled to the front, some moons ago, when someone (not naming names) posted a comment to a comm that, "Freud wasn't science because his theories weren't falsifiable."
Now, there may be reasons some or all of what Freud wrote wasn't science -- I'm not enormously motivated to defend Freud here -- but it would seem to me that lack of falsifiability isn't one. I'm under the -- admittedly somewhat hazy -- impression that not only is some of his theorizing falsifiable, it had been falsified. I know for a fact some of his followers' theories were falsified experimentally: Hooker (1957) and Armon (196?), e.g.
At the time Freud wrote, the mind was a black box and there was very, very little we could do to look into it. What there was to do, Kraepelin did -- study crazy people very carefully, and then after they died, put their brains under a microscope to see if people with similar symptoms had similar morphologies and evident pathologies.
Today, of course, we can watch brains in real time thanks to fMRIs. We have no idea what we're looking at -- yet. That will change, and soon. Over the last centuries, we've sent all sorts of probes into working minds -- sometimes, quite literally -- and learned all sorts of things about brains while they're running.
In a very real sense, what can be falsified today is quite different than what could be falsified 100 years ago. Does that mean what science is changes with technological advances?
I presume someone is going to step forward to say that falsifiability doesn't refer to what is logistically falsifiable, but logically falsifiable. To them I ask: so what makes something logically unfalsifiable?
Think carefully.
Is there any sort of proposition which is not falsifiable that is not also a reference to the (definitionally) supernatural? Literally, that which is "above" (super) natural?
I haven't read Popper, but as a good little geek I've sure heard of him -- between the science background and the atheism background, you can't miss the notion of falsifiability being the bedrock of what constitutes science.
It's sure a nice idea. Very handy. But something has bothered me about it for a long time, in the back of my mind. This got pulled to the front, some moons ago, when someone (not naming names) posted a comment to a comm that, "Freud wasn't science because his theories weren't falsifiable."
Now, there may be reasons some or all of what Freud wrote wasn't science -- I'm not enormously motivated to defend Freud here -- but it would seem to me that lack of falsifiability isn't one. I'm under the -- admittedly somewhat hazy -- impression that not only is some of his theorizing falsifiable, it had been falsified. I know for a fact some of his followers' theories were falsified experimentally: Hooker (1957) and Armon (196?), e.g.
At the time Freud wrote, the mind was a black box and there was very, very little we could do to look into it. What there was to do, Kraepelin did -- study crazy people very carefully, and then after they died, put their brains under a microscope to see if people with similar symptoms had similar morphologies and evident pathologies.
Today, of course, we can watch brains in real time thanks to fMRIs. We have no idea what we're looking at -- yet. That will change, and soon. Over the last centuries, we've sent all sorts of probes into working minds -- sometimes, quite literally -- and learned all sorts of things about brains while they're running.
In a very real sense, what can be falsified today is quite different than what could be falsified 100 years ago. Does that mean what science is changes with technological advances?
I presume someone is going to step forward to say that falsifiability doesn't refer to what is logistically falsifiable, but logically falsifiable. To them I ask: so what makes something logically unfalsifiable?
Think carefully.
Is there any sort of proposition which is not falsifiable that is not also a reference to the (definitionally) supernatural? Literally, that which is "above" (super) natural?