I feel like I may be missing something here because there are some smart Popperians I respect, but the things they say don’t make any sense to me.
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Replying to @Meaningness @marick
That's a shame. As Brian is aware, no other school of thinkers has made nearly such good sense to me, but plainly I can't pour my understanding from my mind into yours.
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Popper may have overestimated the degree to which his epistemic claims could be prominent in scientific endeavors, but my sense is that people miss the structural simplicity of his core idea. Science is big, messy, and human. The *advantage* of science is none of these.
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The advantage in science is the symmetry-breaking relationship of empirical incompatibility. I.e. measuring phenomena and having the results be incompatible with an explanatory theory.
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Yeah… this seems to me to account for very little of what makes science work. Hypothesis testing is not mostly what scientists do. It’s not even what’s attempted in many classes of experiments. The story doesn’t explain where hypotheses come from, or what counts as falsification
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Replying to @Meaningness @marick
People expect Popper to provide advice on how science should be done. That was never his project, so dragging him into discussions on sociology of science or the like is usually a waste of time and an excuse to characterize his work as lacking.
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So… what’s his key contribution, then? “Science replaces wrong theories with better ones” is true and important, but not original or unique to him.
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Replying to @Meaningness @marick
His contribution is on the *logic* of scientific discovery, and how leveraging the logical asymmetry occurs in every instance where there is growth of knowledge.
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What is the logic? (I’m sincerely trying to understand here, although tbh I’m not optimistic, and we can drop this whenever you get frustrated with it)
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Replying to @Meaningness @marick
Modus Tollens provides an opportunity for elimination. Modus Ponens does not. This is the asymmetry. Knowledge advances through error correction and only through error correction.
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So… what do you make of Duhem/Quine? My take is that, since background assumptions are unbounded, it’s fatal for this logical account.
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