I am not convinced you understand Popper and/or certainly you did not do him justice as far as I understand your argumentation.
In addition to Popper himself, suggest you explore David Deutsch who builds on Popper re the scientific method and epistemology in general - try the "Beginning of Infinity" and I am reasonably confident it would at least make you think. Brett Hall is also a good option if you want to get the Popper/Deutsch steel-man. Or you can listen to the Increments, a podcast with 2 fans of Popper who actually spend hours reading and commenting on Popper. Both Brett and the Increments guys did a lot of thinking on Bayes, laid out the reasons why it does not work and engaged in debates with Bayesians. Nassim Taleb does not specifically address Bayes in his work but does a lot of work on why induction does not work in fat-tailed systems.
2 brief points from me:
-You said that science is a prediction machine via which our credence in theories increases or decreases based on the observations we make. Deutsch will tell you that's bad philosophy. Science is an explanatory machine whose purpose is to understand phenomena. If you are able to predict something does not necessarily mean you understood it. First chapter of Beginning of Infinity goes deeper into this idea.
-One of Popper's key insights is that all observation is theory-laden. Scientists do not perceive the world in cold brute facts but via an explanatory lens that's individual to each one of them. If I understood your point correctly, you claim Popper says the contrary ie that scientists are cold logicians unaffected by bias.
I have a much broader point on people misusing Bayes to explain reality and assigning %s to our beliefs but I am sure I will get the chance to voice those next time Tom mentions Bayes theorem ie soon :).
I, for one, believe the rules, specifically regarding comma placement, are oppressive, and arbitrary, and should be, in all likelihood, done away with.
Yes Tylenol is a brand name for Paracetamol in the US. The generic name in the US (and some other parts of the world) is Acetaminophen. Both generics come from the actual chemical name of the agent and arise from the fact that the drug was develop to commercial availability almost simultaneously in the US and the UK.
You might eventually want to come to Susan Haack's approach, especially her crossword analogy for the scientific endeavour. She's also written a lot on the difficulties of using scientific evidence in course. At some point she complains about lawyers and judges "wheeling out Popper" (In "Defending Science - Within Reason" I think).
Final comment on how Popper doesn’t deal with theories than can only be tested via statistical results - I don’t think he viewed these sciences as real science.
You could have mentioned the work of Lakatos who provided a sort of synthesis position. He talked about how unexpected results are handled without refuting the theory by distinguishing between progressive problem shifts ( where the theory can be tweaked in a way that increases its predictive power) and degenerative one where the tweaks required raise more problems than they solve leading eventually to a paradigm shift. It’s my contention that modern astrophysicists is in a degenerative phase with the invention of dark energy simply to explain away results.
I studied Philosophy of Science at University and read both Popper and Kuhn (and saw Popper lecture once) so found this interesting . Good summary I thought. It seems to me both their accounts are valid (if also flawed) - Popper is giving a logician’s account of the rational basis of scientific knowledge and describes an aspirational model of how science should be done, as well as a way of distinguishing between science and pseudo science. Kuhn gives an historical and psychological account of how science is actually done , and the way it progresses in history with long periods of ‘normal’ science interspersed with bouts of revolutionary paradigm shifts
Cool that you did this. Have long been interested in philosophy of science. Some additional information (with slight corrections):
The important philosopher of science Adolph Grünbaum wrote a book "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique," which was sharply critical of both Freud and Popper's analysis of Freud. His argument was that Freud indeed made a falsifiable prediction that was falsified: "We know that psychoanalytic interpretations are correct because through correct interpretations (only), patients get better only through psychoanalysis." They don't.
Popper was in fact skeptical that evolutionary theory was falsifiable. Philip Kitcher has written about this in his book "Abusing Science" (Chapter 2).
The replication crisis should make Stuart less rather than more Popperian. From the 1990s through the 2000s I suffered my social psychology colleagues' pretentious insistence that they were engaging in Popperian hypothetico deductive reasoning by making falsifiable predictions. All I can say is "ha!"
I am not convinced you understand Popper and/or certainly you did not do him justice as far as I understand your argumentation.
In addition to Popper himself, suggest you explore David Deutsch who builds on Popper re the scientific method and epistemology in general - try the "Beginning of Infinity" and I am reasonably confident it would at least make you think. Brett Hall is also a good option if you want to get the Popper/Deutsch steel-man. Or you can listen to the Increments, a podcast with 2 fans of Popper who actually spend hours reading and commenting on Popper. Both Brett and the Increments guys did a lot of thinking on Bayes, laid out the reasons why it does not work and engaged in debates with Bayesians. Nassim Taleb does not specifically address Bayes in his work but does a lot of work on why induction does not work in fat-tailed systems.
2 brief points from me:
-You said that science is a prediction machine via which our credence in theories increases or decreases based on the observations we make. Deutsch will tell you that's bad philosophy. Science is an explanatory machine whose purpose is to understand phenomena. If you are able to predict something does not necessarily mean you understood it. First chapter of Beginning of Infinity goes deeper into this idea.
-One of Popper's key insights is that all observation is theory-laden. Scientists do not perceive the world in cold brute facts but via an explanatory lens that's individual to each one of them. If I understood your point correctly, you claim Popper says the contrary ie that scientists are cold logicians unaffected by bias.
I have a much broader point on people misusing Bayes to explain reality and assigning %s to our beliefs but I am sure I will get the chance to voice those next time Tom mentions Bayes theorem ie soon :).
I, for one, believe the rules, specifically regarding comma placement, are oppressive, and arbitrary, and should be, in all likelihood, done away with.
Yes Tylenol is a brand name for Paracetamol in the US. The generic name in the US (and some other parts of the world) is Acetaminophen. Both generics come from the actual chemical name of the agent and arise from the fact that the drug was develop to commercial availability almost simultaneously in the US and the UK.
You might eventually want to come to Susan Haack's approach, especially her crossword analogy for the scientific endeavour. She's also written a lot on the difficulties of using scientific evidence in course. At some point she complains about lawyers and judges "wheeling out Popper" (In "Defending Science - Within Reason" I think).
Final comment on how Popper doesn’t deal with theories than can only be tested via statistical results - I don’t think he viewed these sciences as real science.
You could have mentioned the work of Lakatos who provided a sort of synthesis position. He talked about how unexpected results are handled without refuting the theory by distinguishing between progressive problem shifts ( where the theory can be tweaked in a way that increases its predictive power) and degenerative one where the tweaks required raise more problems than they solve leading eventually to a paradigm shift. It’s my contention that modern astrophysicists is in a degenerative phase with the invention of dark energy simply to explain away results.
I studied Philosophy of Science at University and read both Popper and Kuhn (and saw Popper lecture once) so found this interesting . Good summary I thought. It seems to me both their accounts are valid (if also flawed) - Popper is giving a logician’s account of the rational basis of scientific knowledge and describes an aspirational model of how science should be done, as well as a way of distinguishing between science and pseudo science. Kuhn gives an historical and psychological account of how science is actually done , and the way it progresses in history with long periods of ‘normal’ science interspersed with bouts of revolutionary paradigm shifts
Cool that you did this. Have long been interested in philosophy of science. Some additional information (with slight corrections):
The important philosopher of science Adolph Grünbaum wrote a book "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique," which was sharply critical of both Freud and Popper's analysis of Freud. His argument was that Freud indeed made a falsifiable prediction that was falsified: "We know that psychoanalytic interpretations are correct because through correct interpretations (only), patients get better only through psychoanalysis." They don't.
Popper was in fact skeptical that evolutionary theory was falsifiable. Philip Kitcher has written about this in his book "Abusing Science" (Chapter 2).
The replication crisis should make Stuart less rather than more Popperian. From the 1990s through the 2000s I suffered my social psychology colleagues' pretentious insistence that they were engaging in Popperian hypothetico deductive reasoning by making falsifiable predictions. All I can say is "ha!"