[jimwhite42]

I've been wondering if falsifiability is misunderstood, based on what a few people have commented about it. The alternative version is only that if claims are made that a system has made specific predictions that proved to be true, then it should be falsifiable on that basis. This was Popper's criticism of Marxists claiming Marxism was scientific - they would constantly claim that Marxism can predict what already happened, but it's bogus to claim this in retrospect, they repeatedly claimed this for occurrances only after they had occurred. Is this the same as demanding every theory be falsifiable?

Sean Carroll talks pretty positively about string theory. I think he paints the picture that although the popular view is it's not falsifiable (or not yet), therefore it's somewhere between very suspicious and junk, but actual theoretical physicists are much more positive about it.

[vivekd]

Popper did have the idea of combating communism's claim of being a science or scientific materialism. And that's a pretty noble goal in my mind. His heart was in the right place.

I don't think Popper was going for that soft falsifiability - but if you modify his theory to do that, say it has to make some predictions, and only require that it should be falsifiable on the basis of it's predictions, you let in a lot of stuff in that obvious isn't science.

To take the obvious example of using exactly what Popper was trying to oppose. the current Chinese communist party's claim that capitalism will eventually transition into socialism once a certain level of development is achieved, it is a prediction, it will be falsifiable later. Clearly it is still not science.

But even if we give Popper the falsifiability angle and imagine there is some workable version of falsifiability, I still don't thik his theory works, it's just not a good reflection of day to day science and scientists.

[jimwhite42]

> To take the obvious example of using exactly what Popper was trying to oppose. the current Chinese communist party's claim that capitalism will eventually transition into socialism once a certain level of development is achieved, it is a prediction, it will be falsifiable later. Clearly it is still not science.

I think this is the point on this issue, right? It can't count as falsifiable later, or still not science, unless they describe what they mean by "socialism" specifically enough in advance - which I think is a pretty nebulous constraint? Not sure about it. Definitely, there's a lot of (reasonable IMO) theoretical controversy about what 'welfare capitalism' has to do with proper socialist ideas, even though it's usually given the label 'socialist'.

I've also been wondering things like what working scientists do, and what this thing is that we call science generally - non research related stuff like teaching, or using science to do better engineering, and what the connection is between the two.

Is there still a place for any variation of falsifiability?

Bonus cheeky request: do you have any recommendations on modern philosophy of science?

[vivekd]

Fyerabend is the top dog right now I wouldn't recommend investing too much in him, he basically thinks there is no demarcation and Voodoo and Einstein are equally valid.

I accept Quine who I admit isn't much better, he thinks it's all about creating a coherent world view. I think he's onto something but he's missing truth which I think is a problem - we want to think science gives us truths about the world, or at least we want a way to get to truth.

There's another view that says science starts with a set of untested assumptions which I haven't gotten around to reading much about

[jimwhite42]

I like some of what I think I understand about Feyerabend's ideas, but I didn't get on with his actual books. I expected something ethnographic-y or observation based, but only found incredibly abstract stuff.

I listened to a few interviews with Liam Kofi Bright, and his ideas about what truth is are pretty interesting. The perspective of 'giving us truths' or 'getting to the truth', is unsatisfying to me.

I think there has to be a core of some kind of 'predict what will happen when we do something, then see how close we got, tweak it in response to these observations, then repeat'.