treat popper better - Githubissues

From Aaron Peikert:
he chapter is excellent. I think it is a very good introduction to some
important ideas. What I am missing is the idea of verisimilitude. I am
not sure if that leads me to find your distinction between falsification
and "holistic" view to be not entirely helpful. You make it sound a bit
like Popper would see a theory as refuted by a single experiment,
whereas Lacatos doesn't find it so.

That is what Popper says on the topic in Conjectures and Refutations:

 > Ultimately, the idea of verisimilitude is most important in cases
where we know that we have to work with theories which are at best
approximations---that is to say, theories of which we actually know that
they cannot be true. In these cases we can still speak of better or
worse approximation to the truth (and we therefore do not need to
interpret these cases in an instrumentalist sense).

While falsification is binary, a study may escape falsification more or
less unscathed. Apraising a "refutation" leads to the important ideas of
degrees of riskiness, information content, degree of falsification and
finally to corroboration (the last term must be mentioned in the
chapter, I think).

The move that you are making is to portrait Popper as Popper 0, the
imaginary author of a vulgarised version of Popperian
philosophy of science, a phantom created by Ayer, Medawar, Nagel and others.

A move that is criticized by Lakatos in Criticism and the Methodology of
Scientific Research Programmes:

 > Popper 0's position-as Popper constantly stresses-is untenable: 'no
conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced'. If one insists
that 'refutation' consists in strict disproof, one 'will never benefit
from experience, and never learn from it how wrong [one is]'. So we may
just as well forget about Popper 0.

 > Popper 1, unlike Popper 1, is real.

 > Popper 1's famous slogans are: 'make sincere attempts to refute your
theories', 'we learn from our mistakes', 'a refutation is a victory'.

 > Popper 2 concentrates on growth, not on refutation. His problem is
how to appraise which is the best among competing possibly false theories.

I think it would be more helpful to make the dichotomy between
confirmationists (Carnap, Quine) and falsificationists (Popper, Lakatos,
Mayo), and method critics (Kuhn, Feyerabend).
langcog / experimentology

treat popper better #187
