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

["Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Correction: "attacks on empiricism" should read "attacks on historicism". 
Mervyn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List" 
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Quick on Popper and falsification


> 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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