chapter 7

Question 1

• How did Popper and others want to seperate Science from non Science?

Modification of logical posivist theory → addition to verification: conformation, falsification and corroboration

Answer 1

found out by method of verification → tool to cut away meaningless info, statement must be open to verification, can‘t be verified = meaningless, criterion of cognitive significance → line between science and pseudoscience/metaphyisics

Conformation: rather than coming up with the hypothesis, then testing hypothesis a bit and concluding that it is now verified that the hypothesis was correct → all we can do is confirm that the statement is not false, increasing the probability that it is true.
Hypothesis can‘t ever be proven until every possibility of hypothesis was tried but every successful try would be increasing the chance that this hypothesis is correct.

Popper was critical → even metaphics would become science with this theory → added

Falsificationism: something can be classified as science when it is possible to test whether it is false → As long as this is possible, that statement can be seen as real science

Corroboration: When an hypothesis survives a certain test, it is not verified or conformed, but it is merely corroborated: it has not yet been proven wrong, but will be accepted for the time being.

→ Only Theories that can be Falsified are Informative
→ use deduction instead of induction → hidden assumption in IND: The Future is like the Past

Question 2

What did Popper say for natural vs social sciences?

Answer 2

-natural sciences have unchanging laws while the social sciences rely on different situations all the time

-social sciences don‘t have laws, merely trends → cannot predict future certainly

-social and natural sciences used the same method of investigation, with as only difference the fact that the social sciences required more complicated experiments

Question 3

What did Popper say about the complexity of the social sciences? 2

Answer 3

• To make the social sciences less complicated, he introduced the Rationality Principle
  → scientists were allowed to work with the idea that human beings more or less act rationally
  • Social science: (1) situational description and analysis, (2) Rationality Principle, (3) hypothesis and prediction.

Question 4

What are some Criticism of Critical Rationalism? 5

Answer 4

-Temprorary Immunisation: major theory should be immunised when a small part is temporarily proven wrong, so that another argument can be put in its place.

-Pseudosciences Often Make Falsifiable Claims

-Replacing One False Theory by Another False Theory is not Progress

-Deductive Testing Presupposes Induction: Collins dictionary: a raven is “a black bird” → raven which is not black, it is actually not a raven. It’s all about our definitions, so actually, even statements like “all raven are black” cannot be falsified

-observation is theory-laden → makes it selective (Popper)