Sir Karl Popper's "Science as Falsification"

Originally published in "Conjectures and Refutations" (1963). A key discussion in the philosophy of science.

A discussion of Sir Karl's Problem of Demarcation and the principle of falsification.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

You may notice a few places where the audio seems to skip. This is a microphone glitch that has recently developed. I made my best effort to repair or simply trim away any defects I spotted. I'll probably need to purchase a new microphone in the near future.

Learn more about Sir Karl Popper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Karl
• Popper
• Philosophy
• of
• Science
• demarcation
• pseudoscience
• critical
• thinking
• falsification
• Marx
• Adler
• Einstein
• Freud
• c0nc0rdance

[C0nc0rdance]

@klutterkicker

It's a valid criticism, but I just don't have time to re-record, re-edit and produce this video a second time. I did my best in editing to clean it up. My microphone is failing, so my brief attempt at re-recorded patches ended up with more glitches.

It'll get better.

[C0nc0rdance]

@sicoticosandro

Remember that his framework doesn't address the "accuracy" of the theories, only whether or not they are scientific. Some of Marx's predictions take the risk of being "incompatible with observation", which makes them scientific, and others do not. That's the only criteria for demarcation, according to Popper: falsifiable predictions.

[Eopyk]

I forgot to say yesterday that thank you for posting this read of Karl Popper :)

[rafaelwaa]

Best video on youtube !

[kyebean]

this rocks, unfortunately I think that the people who would benefit most from understanding it are probably a bit too dense to grasp Popper's points.

[rafaelwaa]

Great Video !

[madenskm]

@websnarf By your own phrasing, many prior experiments demonstrated Chimpanzees didn't have theory of mind. Do you intend to call these unscientific because they failed to dramatically overturn an accepted theory? To do this would be to ignore most of the work being done in genetics, which leans heavily on the central dogma of genetic expression and replication. Most science takes this form, and it is no less legitimately scientific than so-called revolutionary findings. But it is more boring.

[websnarf]

@madenskm This is utterly false. Look. There were *MANY* experiments that demonstrated that Chimpanzees didn't have a "theory of mind". So this lead to the theory that they simply don't have that ability. Then one single (ingeneous) experiment by Brian Hare et al, demonstrated that they did have it. The original theory (both default, and with heavy experimental backing) was *instantaneously* overturned by one single experiment.

This actually *is* how real science is done.

[C0nc0rdance]

@AlwaysSunni

Great! This sounds like a great challenge. Find an astrologist willing to play along. Get them to make a blinded prediction about a person given a certain birth date. Make sure it's a factual, objective prediction that is "risky"... couldn't easily be predicted by other models of human behavior and incompatible with other explanations.

Present them with the failure and see what they do. Do they discard the theory?

It's not unlike the Randi $1M Challenge.

[AlwaysSunni]

@C0nc0rdance I am disputing Popper's demarcation criterion. Astrology is (in principle) falsifiable because we can test its claims about the correlations between celestial and human activity. (One problem though is that astrologers can always say "This or that failed because I had incomplete information".)

The reason I think astrology was scientific in Ptolemy's time but is woefully unscientific now is that there were no attractive alternatives to astrology in the 2nd century; now there are.

[EikC]

Image at 11:48 -- Gravitational lensing.