Re: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification

["Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth

No. Popper overlooks that in order to demonstrate just one falsifying 
instance of an empirical invariance, some proposition within some 
theoretical framework has to be accepted, i.e. be regarded as 
non-conjectural (this has been my epistemological point to Tobin); and that 
this depends upon the unconditional predictions that Popper himself roundly 
condemned in his attacks on empiricism, i.e. the counter-instance can't be 
regarded as holding unless you have warrant for holding that it will show up 
on all similar experiments - so the problem of induction is not resolved, 
nor is it resolvable within an actualist framework.

NB. CR fallibilism is by no means the same as Peirceian 
fallibilism/Popperian falsificationism, and by my last post I'd started to 
think that Tobin must think it is. CR doesn't proceed just by eliminating 
the false, but more fundamentally by discovering the true.

Mervyn



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List" 
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 6:28 PM
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification


Hi Mervyn,

You know, I don't any longer think that Popper has that problem on his own 
terms.  That is, he does, as you say, accept a conception of law as 
generalization.  As such, laws, he thinks, can't be conclusively established 
(this because of the decisive blow he thinks Hume has delivered to 
inductionand), and must therefore always only be viewed fallibilistically, 
as conjectures.  On his own terms, though, refutation doesn't have the same 
problem.  This, I think, because with refutation it doesn't matter if, 
philosophically, you can't (because of the induction problem) know that 
you'll get the same refutation-constituting event on the 610th try.  It only 
takes one instance of an x not being y to disprove the law "For all x, y," 
or "All x's are y."

No?

I mean for Popper, given the configuration of his own thinking.

r.



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