> The Popperian biz about predictions is silly anyway.
> No social science
> can survive the Popper test. Maybe that's one reason
> why the
> philosophy of science people rejected it years ago.
Well on the strict version of falsificationism, that there must be a crucual test in which the theory stands or falls, no scientific theory can survive if you are willing to make enough changes elsewhere. Thsi was Quine's point and Duhen's, but Popper actually picked it up pretty quick.
Although in fairness to Popper in physics, chemistry, and laboratory quite often there are crucial experiments in which a theory stands or falls. My favorite story, Einstein's GTR predicts that light from the sun will bend by a small but measurable amount around the perihellion of Mercury. Shortly after the theory was published, scientists took advantage of a handy eclipse to test the prediction, and lo! It was verified. Someone asked Einstein, What would you have done if the prediction had failed? Einstein replied: I should have been sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.
-- Yeah, you can always fall back on mesauring error, oddness in the instruments (a favorire 16th century excuse for rejecting Galileo's telescopic observersation of the moons of Jupiter.). I heard a sad story along these lines from a biologist friend whose career was ruined when no one could repriduce his experiments and he had backdated entries in his lab journals (everyone does), but ten years later it turned out taht he was right and the fact of the matter was that he was just a super good experimenralist with great hands, and it was everybody else's fault they couldn't then reproduce his results.
So, he's been vindicated and his results are now accepted but his career is still ruined. Nonetheless a lot of real science works by setting up crucial experiments.
You get grants -- as the unfortunate guy in my story shows -- by having your experiments NOT fail. (I should say that although I am a lawyer I am surrounded by a sea of experimental scientists in family friends and former teachers.)
All that be as it may, in social science it is very hard to come up with things that look like crucial experiments -- too many variables, too little agreememnt on background conditions, too much room for legitimate adjustments elsewhere. Though I've been reading Jared Diamond, he's really impressive at coming up with things taht look like crucila experiments ins ocial science.
Nonetheless, Popper's insights have not been altogether rejected, and if you design a scientific theory so that it is immune to disconfirmatory test, that is going to be looked upon as a scientific flaw. It is one reason that Davidson considers psychology, which he essentially identifies as decision theory (silly idea), to be philosophy rather than science -- he doesn't think we could accept any of the apparent experimental disconfirmations of decision theory, such as those D himself usded to work on in the 50s and which were urged more famously by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky.
In addition, the Lakotos version of Popperianism, which suggests taht is you have a research program that fails to generate new preductions to test and spends all its time twisting itself around making adjustments elsewhere to deal with disconfirmatory ones (think of Marxian value theory, sorry, Jim), you are not deal with a progressive and promising scientific enterprise.
So, Popper is nor as washed up as all that, you just can't stick too hard with the crude version of falsificationism that Popper himself quickly abansoned.
jks
>
> It's a good thing to make predictions, but I don't
> think it's
> necessary to social science. There are also other
> ways to criticize
> social science (e.g., internal logical consistency
> and methological
> wholeness).
> --
> Jim Devine
> "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or
> calling is an
> intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James
> Baldwin
>
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