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Even though Popper is clearly not a relativist, Sokal and Bricmont discuss falsifiability because they see postmodernist epistemological relativism as a reaction to Popper's description of falsifiability, and more generally, to his theory of science.
Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into prima facie difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as "2 + 2 = 4", could ever be shown to be false.
Popper argues that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability, because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a reproducible experiment or observation can refute one. According to Popper: "non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.
In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and sufficient criterion for demarcation. He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences", so that a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time.
The founder of critical rationalism: Karl Popper. In the mid-twentieth century, several important philosophers began to critique the foundations of logical positivism.In his work The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), Karl Popper, the founder of critical rationalism, argued that scientific knowledge grows from falsifying conjectures rather than any inductive principle and that ...
He would later affirm that the content of the verifiability criterion cannot be empirically verified, thus is meaningless by its own proposition and ultimately self-defeating as a principle. [59] In the same book, Popper proposed falsifiability, which he presented, not as a criterion of cognitive meaning like verificationism (as commonly ...
This led Popper to his falsifiability criterion. Popper wrote about critical rationalism in many works, including: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959), [ 1 ] The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), [ 2 ] Conjectures and Refutations (1963), [ 3 ] Unended Quest (1976), [ 4 ] and The Myth of the Framework (1994).
In Popper's philosophy of science, scientific statements are always provisional, they have limits of application, and they could always be wrong. If a statement cannot even in principle be proved wrong, it cannot be a scientific statement. Thus, in Popper's eyes, the falsifiability criterion clearly demarcates "science" from "non-science". This ...