IBP Psychology and Science

Chapter 6:  Sophisticated falsificationism, novel predictions and the growth of science

A hypothesis should be more falsifiable than the one for which it is offered as a replacement.

The sophisticated falsificationist account of science, with its emphasis on the growth of science, switches the focus of attention from the merits of a single theory to the relative merits of competing theories.

Instead of asking of a theory, ‘Is it falsifiable?’, ‘How falsifiable is it?’it becomes more appropriate to ask, ‘Is this newly proposed theory a viable replacement for the one it challenges?’

Example of Galileo and an Aristotelian adversary:

• Galileo: the moon is not a smooth sphere but it has mountains and craters
• Aristotelian adversary: admitted that he observed the same, but as it is an Aristotelian notion that all celestial bodies are perfect spheres, he came up with the following argument -there is an invisible substance on the moon filling the craters and covering the mountains in such a way that the moon’s shape is perfectly spherical
• the modified theory led to no new testable consequences and would be quite unacceptable to a falsificationist

Example of bread:

• in a French village, those who ate bread became seriously ill and many died
• The hypothesis: “All bread nourishes” is falsified
• Ad hoc modification: “All bread, with the exception of that particular batch of bread produced in the French village in question, nourishes”
• Better modification: “All bread nourishes except bread made from wheat contaminated by a particular kind of fungus” (followed by a specification of the fungus and some of its characteristics)
  •  Not ad hoc because it leads to new tests
  • It is independently testable-example: testing the wheat from which the poisonous bread was made for the presence of the fungus

Significant advances will be marked by the confirmation of bold conjectures or the falsification of cautious conjectures

• Cases of the former kind will be informative, and constitute an important contribution to scientific knowledge, simply because they mark the discovery of something that was previously unheard of or considered unlikely
• The falsification of cautious conjectures is informative because it establishes that what was regarded as unproblematically true is in fact false

What rates as a bold conjecture at one stage in the history of science may no longer be bold at some later stage

• A conjecture will be bold if its claims are unlikely in the light of the background knowledge of the time
• Example: Einstein’s general theory of relativity was a bold one in 1915 because at that time background knowledge included the assumption that light travels in straight lines

Confirmation

• Confirmations of new theories are important as they constitute evidence that a new theory is an improvement on the theory it replaces
• Because of the falsificationists’ emphasis on the growth of science, their account of confirmation is significantly different from that of the inductivists.
• Confirming instances are such if they give inductive support to a theory, and the greater the number of confirming instances established, the greater the support for the theory and the more likely it is to be true
• In the falsificationist account, the significance of confirmations depends very much on their historical context. A confirmation will confer some high degree of merit on a theory if that confirmation resulted from the testing of a novel prediction

Advantages of falsificationism over inductionism:

• The factual basis for science is fallible - this does not pose as big a problem for falsificationists as it does for inductivists, since the falsificationist seeks only constant improvement in science rather than demonstrations of truth or probable truth.
• The inductionists had difficulty answering questions concerning the circumstances under which facts can be said to give significant support to theories. In falsificationism, facts give significant support to theories when they constitute severe tests of that theory. The confirmations of novel predictions are important members of this category.
• While the inductivist has problems explaining how knowledge of the unobservable can ever be derived from observable facts, the falsificationist has no such problem. Claims about the unobservable can be severely tested, and hence supported, by exploring their novel consequences.

Resources:

What is This Thing Called Science 4^th Edition (CHALMERS)