I am not saying Popper was scientifically illiterate at all. I find falsification a beautiful ideal, and have admiration for him.
But I am saying that you get very different philosophy of science if you base your writings not on your abstract reflections of how a perfect science ought to work, but on doing experiments yourself—Poppers thesis was “On the Problem of Method in the Psychology of Thinking”. More importantly, on observing researchers doing actual, effective research, and how it is determined which theories make it and which don’t.
And I am saying that the messiness of real science makes pure falsification naive and even counterproductive—it rules out some things too late (which should have been given up as non-promising), and others too early (when their core idea was brilliant, but the initial way of phrasing this was still faulty, or needed additional constraints; theories, when first developed, aren’t yet finished). E.g. looking at paradigmatic revolutions in science, and where they actually came from, what impact experiments falsifying them actually had—many theories we now recognise as clearly superior to the ones they supplanted were, in their initial imperfect formulation, or due to external implicit assumptions that were false, or due to faulty measuring instruments, falsified; and yet the researchers did not give up on them, and turned out to be right not to. But they did the very things Popper was so worried about—make a theory, make a prediction, do an experiment, see the prediction did not work out—and keep the theory anyway, adapting it to the prediction. The question at which point this becomes perfecting a promising theory into a coherent beauty that explains all prior observations and now also makes precise novel predictions that come true, and at which point it becomes patching up utter nonsense with endless random additions that make no sense except to account for the bonkers results, is not a trivial one to answer, but an important one. Take the classic switch to placing the sun in the center of the solar system, rather than the earth. Absolutely correct move. Also initially lead to absolute nonsense in the predictions, because the initial false theory had been patched up so many times to match predictions that it could predict quite a bit, while the new theory, being wrong about a huge number of other factors about how planets move, was totally off. If you put the sun in the center, but assume planets run on a perfect circle around it, and have not got the faintest idea how gravity works, the planet’s actual location will be very different from the one you suspected—but the thing that is wrong here is not your idea that the sun ought to be in the center, it is the idea that a planet circles the sun in a perfect circle. But in practice, figuring out which of your assumptions led to the mess is not that easy, but really has to be done in the long run.
Imre Lakatos did a decent attempt of tracing this, also integrating Thomas Kuhn’s excellent ideas on paradigm shifts in science.
I am not saying Popper was scientifically illiterate at all. I find falsification a beautiful ideal, and have admiration for him.
But I am saying that you get very different philosophy of science if you base your writings not on your abstract reflections of how a perfect science ought to work, but on doing experiments yourself—Poppers thesis was “On the Problem of Method in the Psychology of Thinking”. More importantly, on observing researchers doing actual, effective research, and how it is determined which theories make it and which don’t.
And I am saying that the messiness of real science makes pure falsification naive and even counterproductive—it rules out some things too late (which should have been given up as non-promising), and others too early (when their core idea was brilliant, but the initial way of phrasing this was still faulty, or needed additional constraints; theories, when first developed, aren’t yet finished). E.g. looking at paradigmatic revolutions in science, and where they actually came from, what impact experiments falsifying them actually had—many theories we now recognise as clearly superior to the ones they supplanted were, in their initial imperfect formulation, or due to external implicit assumptions that were false, or due to faulty measuring instruments, falsified; and yet the researchers did not give up on them, and turned out to be right not to. But they did the very things Popper was so worried about—make a theory, make a prediction, do an experiment, see the prediction did not work out—and keep the theory anyway, adapting it to the prediction. The question at which point this becomes perfecting a promising theory into a coherent beauty that explains all prior observations and now also makes precise novel predictions that come true, and at which point it becomes patching up utter nonsense with endless random additions that make no sense except to account for the bonkers results, is not a trivial one to answer, but an important one. Take the classic switch to placing the sun in the center of the solar system, rather than the earth. Absolutely correct move. Also initially lead to absolute nonsense in the predictions, because the initial false theory had been patched up so many times to match predictions that it could predict quite a bit, while the new theory, being wrong about a huge number of other factors about how planets move, was totally off. If you put the sun in the center, but assume planets run on a perfect circle around it, and have not got the faintest idea how gravity works, the planet’s actual location will be very different from the one you suspected—but the thing that is wrong here is not your idea that the sun ought to be in the center, it is the idea that a planet circles the sun in a perfect circle. But in practice, figuring out which of your assumptions led to the mess is not that easy, but really has to be done in the long run.
Imre Lakatos did a decent attempt of tracing this, also integrating Thomas Kuhn’s excellent ideas on paradigm shifts in science.