January 7th, 2009
When I were a lad, I was taught that science can never prove anything.
That it can only make statements which have not yet been disproven,
and that every scientific law/maths theorem etc, is only 'true' until
proved wrong, which could happen at any time.
What is this thinking called, and who came up with it?Hi, macaonghus-ga:
Viennese philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994):
[Karl Popper]
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
is the most familiar proponent of "falsifiability" as a criterion for
scientific theories, although the notion that a general statement
would be disproven by a single discordant observation is an ancient
logical principle.
[Falsifiability - Wikipedia]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Popper developed this concept of falsifiability in the 1930's to
address the question of legitimacy of "induction" from empirical
observation. Many observers think his early attraction to and
subsequent disappointment with Marxism contributed to sharpening his
philosophical focus on this issue.
[Karl Raimund Popper]
http://home.t-online.de/home/Hans-Joachim.Niemann/Popper/popper02_e.htm
The Logic of Scientific Discovery ( ) is Popper's most extended
defense of this principle. Writing later, in Of Clocks and Clouds
(1966), Popper says that he wished he had learned earlier of the
writings by American logician Charles Pierce, who proposed a concept
of fallibilism.
[Karl Popper - wordIQ Dictionary]
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Karl_Popper
[Charles Sanders Pierce]
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/
I do not think that axiomatic mathematics is a "scientific theory" in
quite the same sense. Opinions about the foundations of mathematics
vary, but for formalists that contend all mathematics is deduction
from chosen axioms, a theorem cannot be falsified. At most it would
be concluded that the original axioms, from which the theorem is
proven, are inconsistent. Note also that in mathematics the principle
of induction is axiomatic, and hence a part of the deductive method of
reasoning rather than requiring special justification as empirical
induction does.
regards, mathtalk-gaI inadvertently left out the date of publication for The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (English, 1959; first published as Logik Der
Forschung in Vienna: Springer, 1934).
[Karl Popper's Main Works in English]
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/intro_reading/Introductory_Reading.html
regards, mathtalk-ga#If you have any other info about this subject , Please add it free.# |
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