Popperism (was Chomsky -- Put up or blah blah)

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

In another life, before I became a lawyer, was trained as an analytical philosopher of science, though not "in the Popperian tradition," but as sort of Quinean pragmatic scientific realist. However, the question is, do we ever know a scientific theory is false? If the point is, we can always hold any propositiona s true by making enough suitable adjustments elsewhere in the web of belief, well, yes, in some sense. But in the rael world, we know, for example, that creationism is false because it can't explain dinosaur fossils, as my six year old pointed out; that Newtonian mechanics is false, or at least not true except as a limit case, because it is inconsistent on key points with relativity theory, which explains morea ns is well-confirmed, as well as with quantum theory (so NM doesn't apply at all at the subatomic level); we know that phlogiston theory is false in part because things do no get get heavier when they burn and in part because we have a better theory that has no!
!

 place for phlogiston, etc. 

Can we "completely certain" that a scientific theory is false? No. But we can be certain enough to bet our lives on it. I would bet my life that phlogiston theory is false. If the creationists are right, I have bet my immortal soul that creationism is false. How much more certainty do you want?

--jks

<< 
Pardon me if these are silly questions the answers to which someone trained 
in the Popperian tradition would have learned on his or her mama's knee, as 
it were (we Heidegger specialists aren't known for being up on 
Anglo-American philosophy of science; we're far too fuzzy-minded, ahem, I 
meant to say, think far too poetically):


>Remember, you can't ever be certain that a scientific theory is true, you 
>can only be certain that it is false.

I really don't see how one could ever be completely certain that a given 
scientific theory is false.  As far as I know, for instance, noone has ever 
"falsified" the basic Ptolemaic understanding of the universe.  Can't you 
just keep adding epicycles until your theory fits the data?  This could get 
pretty clumsy after a while, admittedly, but I don't see how this is 
relevant unless theoretical efficiency and economy get made into criteria of 
truth.  Is a basically pragmatist understanding of truth being espoused 
here?  Which gets me to my second question:


>
>Yes and no.  There are external criteria for determining which theories to 
>favour.  Like generality, brevity, and specificity.  When a theory becomes 
>laden with special rules and exceptions, one starts looking for an 
>alternative.

These are aesthetic criteria, aren't they?  Do we have some kind of 
epistemological basis for saying that truth resides a priori in the general, 
the brief, and the specific, other than that accepting the idea makes life 
easier for us?

Spasibo,
Chris Doss
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