Abstract
There is already a sizeable literature in which the question posed in the title of this essay is answered in the negative. That literature includes the writings of Imre Lakatos.
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Notes
Lakatos, I., ‘The Role of Crucial Experiments in Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 4 (1974), 310; hereafter this paper will be cited within the text as ‘RCES’.
Popper, K. R., Conjectures and Refutations, Basic Books, New York and London, 1962, p. 256. Hereafter this work will be cited as ‘C & R’ within the text.
See Grünbaum, A., ‘Can a Theory Answer more Questions than one of its Rivals?’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27 (1976), 1–24 and the author’s subsequent articles in that volume in the June and December issues.
Cf. Russell, B., Human Knowledge, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1948, p. 381.
Popper, K. R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959, p. 420 (italics in original). Hereafter this work will be cited within the text as ‘LSD’.
According to Lakatos [RCES, p. 315 and ‘Popper on Demarcation and Induction’ (hereafter ‘PDI’), The Philosophy of Karl Popper, The Library of Living Philosophers (ed. by P. A. Schilpp), Open Court, LaSalle, 1974, Book I, pp. 245–246], Popper tailored his demarcation criterion to the requirement of not according scientific status to the aforementioned four theories.
Burtt, E. A. (ed.), The English Philosophers From Bacon to Mill, Random House (Modern Library Series), New York, 1939, p. 36. Any quotations from Bacon are taken from Burtt’s edition. I am grateful to Ernan McMullin for calling my attention to Aphorism 95 in Book I of Bacon’s Novum Organum, where Bacon seems to stress the sterility of such fact-collecting as is not guided by theory. We shall recall this view of Bacon’s when noting below that it runs counter to Popper’s portrayal of Bacon as echoed by Lakatos.
Joseph, H. W. B., An Introduction to Logic, 2nd revised edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1916.
Ibid., p. 393.
Ibid; cf. also p. 565 n. 1.
Cf. R. Giere’s illuminating discussion [‘An Orthodox Statistical Resolution of the Paradox of Confirmation’, Philosophy of Science 37 (1970), 354–362] of the resolution of Hempel’s paradox of confirmation in statistical theory by means of rejecting a certain version of the instantiation condition. But note the caveat in fn. 31 below concerning the difference between my concept of ‘positive instance’ and the corresponding concept relevant to Giere’s analysis.
Mill, J. S., A System of Logic, 8th edition, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1887, p. 313. Thus, in § 2 of chapter X, Mill explains how his inductive methods can invalidate actually false claims of a plurality of causes. But in §§ 1 and 3 of ch. X, he contends that there are genuine cases of multiple causation. And in § 3, he maintains that his inductive methods can handle the latter as well.
Eysenck, H. J., The Effects of Psychotherapy, International Science Press, New York, 1966, and ‘The Effects of Psychotherapy’, International Journal of Psychiatry 1 (1965), 97–178.
Rachman, S., The Effects of Psychotherapy, Pergamon Press, New York, 1971.
Cf. Bergin, A. E., ‘The Evaluation of Therapeutic Outcomes’, A. E. Bergin and S. L. Garfield (eds.), Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1970, pp. 217–270; see also the important additional references given on pp. 217–218. H. J. Eysenck and G. D. Wilson [The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, Methuen, London, 1973, pp. 378–379] point out that whereas Freud’s theory emphatically denies the existence of spontaneous remission, the latter is one of the best attested findings of psychiatry.
Fromm, E., The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1970, pp. 3–4. Emanuel Peterfreund’s discussion of ‘The Nature of Therapeutic Changes in Psychoanalysis’ [Information Systems, And Psychoanalysis, International Universities Press, New York, 1971, pp. 351–358] does not improve on Fromm, despite Peterfreund’s strongly revisionist, learning-theoretic stance toward Freud.
Bergin, A. E., op. cit., pp. 246–247. For a criticism of this claim, see Rachman, S., op. cit., ch. 3 and p. 16.
Meltzoff, J. and Kornreich, M., Research in Psychotherapy, Atherton Press, New York, 1970, p. 200. See pp. 258, 113–4 and 190 for placebo effect.
Fromm, E., op. cit., p. 4.
Howson, C., ‘Must the Logical Probability of Laws be Zero?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (1973), 153–160. See also Hintikka, J., ‘Carnap and Essler Versus Inductive Generalization’, Erkenntnis 9 (1975), 235–244.
I am indebted to Noretta Koertge for some of these Popper references.
Popper, K. R., Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973. p. 51. Hereafter this work will be cited as ‘OK’.
Popper, K. R., ‘A Theorem on Truth-Content’, in P. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (eds.), Mind, Matter and Method, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1966, Theorem 1, p. 350. For a discussion of relevant details, see Section 2 (i) of the first of my articles cited in note 3 and p. 134 of the second of these articles.
Salmon, W. C., The Foundations of Scientific Inference, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1966, p. 119.
Musgrave, A., Topper and “Diminishing Returns from Repeated Tests” ‘, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 53 (1975), 250.
Ibid., p. 251.
In the paper by Howson cited in note 21 above, he has offered a counterexample on pp. 161–162 to the claim that p(a)=0 for every universal a. See also Hintikka’s paper in note 21.
Harper, H. W., ‘Rational Belief Change, Popper Functions and Counterfactuals’, Synthèse 30(1975), 221.
Good, I. J., British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17 (1966–7), 322) has given a perhaps far-fetched example having the following features: C states that a randomly selected bird is a black raven, H states that ‘all ravens are black’, and P(B & H, C) ≪ 1 (i.e., 102/106). Good takes a black raven to be a ‘case’ (positive instance) of H in a sense DIFFERENT from our above sense, since his B does not assume the initial condition that the randomly selected bird is a raven! And despite the universality of H, the special feature of Good’s example then is that not only is P(B & H, C) ≪ 1, but also P(B & H, C) < P(B, C), so that the ratio on the r.h.s. is less than 1. But this means that the ‘case’ C of the hypothesis yields a posterior probability of H which is smaller than its prior probability: A perhaps somewhat far-fetched but even more resounding repudiation of the instantiation condition than the case of equal prior and posterior probabilities of H. I am indebted to Wesley Salmon and William Harper for helpful comments relating to the violation of the instantiation condition in Bayesian inference and I thank Laurens Laudan for stimulating criticisms of Bayesian inference.
The need to distinguish the factor of probability increase from the amount was overlooked in this context in Salmon’s The Foundations of Scientific Inference, op. cit., pp. 118–120.
Hilpinnen, R., ‘On the Information Provided by Observations’, Hintikka, J., and Suppes, P. (eds.), Information and Inference, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1970, Section II, esp. pp. 100–101. I am indebted to Teddy Seidenfeld not only for this reference but also for very clarifying comments on Allan Gibbard’s results, which I mentioned above.
Grünbaum, A., ‘The Duhemian Argument’, Philosophy of Science 27 (1960), 76, fn. 1. Cf. also A. Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1963, p. 109 n. 4. The second enlarged edition of the latter work (Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston 1973) has the same comment in the same place.
Duhem, P., The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1954, p. 187.
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Grünbaum, A. (1976). Is Falsifiability the Touchstone of Scientific Rationality? Karl Popper Versus Inductivism. In: Cohen, R.S., Feyerabend, P.K., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_16
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