Popper never through that individual hypotheses could be falsified atomistically; his discussion of holism in Conjectures and Refutations is very early and very good. Others got entangled in this dumb debate because they couldn't read or felt that they needed something to argue about. Anyway, the issue is conclusively settled now, science is holistic, falsification is never conclusive. So fucking what? jks
Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "andie nachgeborenen"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews
> 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.
======================
Right, but the latter implicitly assumed without explaining/justifying a
distinction between truth/falsity and meaning and set the stage for the
debate over just what was to be falsifiable; individual assertions [and
associated notions of reference of singular terms which re-introduced the
issues of meaning], hypotheses within a theory or whole
theories
themselves. The critics jumped on the fact that P.'s explication of
falsification did not adequately address the issues involved, its been a
shitstorm ever since.
>
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
=================
Right, but we never test science, anymore than we test capitalism, :-)
Ian