@GoshisDead,
GoshisDead wrote:
kennethamy wrote:
GoshisDead wrote:
kennethamy wrote:
wandeljw wrote:
Popper’s
The Logic of Scientific Discovery was first published in 1935.
In a 1963 essay, Popper summarized his ideas on falsifiability:
Quote:
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")
Popper added that the riskier the theory (the more exposed to refutation) -- the more interesting the theory will be.
Who cares whether a theory is interesting if it is false? What is so wonderful about a risky and false theory. What seems to me important about a theory is that it is true, not whether it is interesting. Interesting, but false does not seem to me to be an recommendation for adopting a theory. Does it to you? Truth is more important than being interesting. By a long shot.
If a theory is not interesting no one will follow it through to the end. Interest is of primary importance to all hypotheses and theories otherwise they escape notice completely. Behavior and motive cannot be distilled to simplistic logic.
But being interesting is, then, only valuable as a means to an end. The intrinsic value of a theory is in whether it is true. Not in whether it is interesting. You don't distinguish between value as a means, and value as an end. And the means has value only in so far as it enables the end to be achieved, namely truth.
The truth value of anything is only as valuable as the interest shown in it.
You may know (or perhaps you don't) that whatever you might mean by the term, "truth-value" that what logicians mean by that technical term is the truth or falsity (as the case may be) of a proposition. As I said, what you might mean by that term, I have no idea. Not that it matters.
