Right, but verifiability as a criterion of cognitive meaningfulness is more susceptible to the reflexivity attack than is falsificationsim as a criterion of demarcation -- it was never offered as a criterion of any sort of meaningfulness. It would be bad if the verification criterion were not cognitively meaningful. But falsfiability was never supposed to be a piece of science, just a test of science. jks
Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "andie nachgeborenen"
> Actually, the falsifiability criterion is supposed to be a demarcation
test (to mark out scoence from nonscience), and not itself a piece of
science, so the self-reference critique wouldn't apply. Crews' critique of
psycholanalysis is not vulgar Popperianism. It based on a careful,
exhaustive, and really thorough interrogation of the major psychoanlytrucl
claims and purported evidence for them. And whatever the genearl faults
with Popperianism might be, only an economist or a philosopher of science
would regard immunity to empirical test as irrelevant to whether a theory
counted as science. jks
======================
I was thinking of it in terms of the whole dispute over the
verificationist approach to meaning, which was loaded with
reflexivity
problems. One can't falsify whether the falsifiability criterion is
sufficient to serve as a demarker.
Ian