Talk:Falsificationism

message: Wow! I was just looking for other places where Popper mentions Quine, and on pages 238 and 239 of Conjectures and Refutations (1962), the same pages where Popper mentions both Duhem and Quine,  So perhaps the first person to use the term "falsificationist" was , to refer to himself! Amazing! I'm adding Conjectures and Refutations to the list of primary sources above! Biogeographist (talk) 21:29, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: (edit conflict with the paragraph below) I don't see the importance of the use of the term "falsificationism" or "falsificationism" by Popper or others. The term is so unclear in the literature that the only thing that can be conveyed to the readers by such an emphasis is confusion. Again, if there is any thing that is conveyed by an author by the fact that he used "falsificationism" in a sentence, then we say it explicitly not ambiguously (not only implying it  by a use of the term "falsificationism"), verify that it is consistent with other sources (including from the same author) and make sure that it's relevant in the context where it is included and that it respects WP:due. Otherwise, it's like picking a sentence out of context. It's the actual point of view of the author, as can be seen by considering many texts that matters. And it must be relevant and respect WP:due.  I thought that we had an understanding on this.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 22:47, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm not advocating ! That's exactly the opposite of what I'm advocating! Biogeographist (talk) 22:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

text:  How can we clear up confusions about how the term is used if we don't mention and explain such uses? That has to be part of it. Biogeographist (talk) 22:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

text: (edit conflict with the two paragraphs added on top of the preceding one) I disagree. It could be important if we were interested in details of the history.  It's dealing with the confusion around the terms "falsificationism" and "falsificationists".  One should not conflate this with a fundamental change in Popper's perspective. If you want to argue for a change in Popper's philosophy, you cannot do this by using the use of a term that has so different meanings. You would have to do that by explicitly explaining Popper's philosophy in 1959, not by cherry picking sentences there and there, then do the same in 1982. The only thing that you will see is that Popper adapted himself to the arguments presented by others. Of course, Popper's way to present his philosophy changed in view of what others wrote. However, you will not see a fundamental change in Popper's philosophy.  Many philosophers fundamentally changed their position over time. For example, we speak of the earlier Russell and the later Russell. The same is true for Wittgenstein. They are actually proud of their change of position and it's very clear that they fundamentally changed their philosophical position. You don't have this in the case of Popper. What you have is some people such as Lakatos that speak of earlier Popper and later Popper, but it matches with a lack of understanding of the distinction between the logical side and the methodological side. When you don't appreciate the distinction, then Popper's evolution in his way to explain his philosophy appears to you as fundamental change.   The key point here is that, no, absolutely not, you cannot speak of change in Popper's position in Wikipedia's voice. If it is relevant in the context, you could say that Lakatos spoke of Popper0, Popper1 and Popper2, but it has to be relevant and respect WP:due. Dominic Mayers (talk) 23:11, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

text: You wrote:  and    As I said, it has to be relevant in the context. The context where it would be relevant is a section that deals specifically about the different, often conflicting, uses of the terms falsificationism and falsificationist. I see what might be your position. You might be thinking that people are perhaps confused by the different uses of these terms and, if we don't cover that, then they might misunderstand what we say and even think that we misrepresent the literature. However, there is a danger that we remain at the level of confusion when we deal with confusion. I think that the most important is to present the important concepts in a way that is verifiable without getting caught in terminological issues.  It is important to primarily put our attention in communicating the key point of views as clearly as possible using terms that are not ambiguous given the context. This is what will help the most to remove confusion. Dominic Mayers (talk) 23:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm glad you added that last paragraph, because after I read your first couple of sentences in this section I was thinking that you were an incredible hypocrite for deciding that Popper's use of the term was important enough for you to mention in the main text of  but completely unimportant to this article. Biogeographist (talk) 23:54, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  Now that you brought out that apparently Popper's forgot that he used the term 20 years earlier, then I think I should remove the line or few lines that discuss that. Honestly, I never considered this important. I kept it, despite the fact that I was uncomfortable with the fact that it discusses terminology,  because it added some support to the view that Popper rejected Lakatos's way to describe his philosophy (which Lakatos did using the terms dogmatic, naive, etc. falsificationism). It was that rejection of an actual view that I considered important, not the rejection of a terminology. I was really uncomfortable with this, especially given that Popper is known to have said that he does not quarrel about terminology. This last point is in my opinion a greater contradiction.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 00:15, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Popper uses the term "falsificationist"!

message: This section was written the best I could many years ago. Falsifiability was in an horrible state when I started to work on it, especially regarding falsificationism. I believe my section was an improvement, but it's difficult to present in a single section what Lakatos wrote in a complete article. When, I started to translate it in French (which I did not do finally), I saw that the match with Lakatos description was not accurate. It's not bad, but still not exactly how Lakatos describes these different falsificationisms. I don't remember exactly what was the issue and whether I corrected it. Anyway, most likely, if I had to write it again, it would be different. Or may be I would not focus too much on the specific way Lakatos describes these different falsificationisms. The way I see it now is that Lakatos's falsificationisms (dogmatic, naive, sophisticated) present Lakatos misunderstanding of Popper's philosophy. For example, the dogmatic falsificationist of Lakatos is very much like the  logical falsificationist in Popper's philosophy. However, in Popper's philosophy, this dogmatic or logical falsificationist still exists, whereas somehow Lakatos consider that Popper got rid of him. The naive falsificationist is the falsificationist that only consider the logical use of the logical falsificationist (given an empirical basis) on the methodological side. This is Popper when he says that epistemology should only consider the logical aspect, i.e., the Popper that says that biological or evolutionary aspects are not a part of epistemology. Again Lakatos considers that Popper is  getting rid of the naive falsificationist when he discusses the role of metaphysical theories and metaphysical research programs and other notions that cannot be justififed logically. However, Popper always considered the distinction important.   This naive falsificationist still exists and it was always there. The sophisticated falsificationist that Lakatos saw partially in Popper philosophy is the falsificationist that accepts the importance of metaphysical theories and research programs.  This sophisticated falsificationist was there very early in Popper's philosophy. Certainly, the role of metaphysics was there in 1934. But, even metaphysical research program is as old as 1949. He wrote a footnote in Schilpp p. 175 to explain that he used the concept  in lectures as early as 1949. The reason why Lakatos says that it's only a partial sophisticated falsificationism is because of the metaphysical part. He wanted very much a verifiable sophisticated falsificationism, verifiable in accordance with some new general inductive principle. He explains that very clearly.  This is why, he explains, he uses the term methodological research program, not metaphysical research program. He proudly says that it distinguish him from Popper's limited sophisticated falsificationist. However, he did not succeed. So, Lakatos was never more than a sophisticated falsificationist that promotes the use of metaphysical research programs. Anyway, the key point is that Lakatos saw an evolution in time in Popper's philosophy, which was not there at all.  They just represent different focuses of Lakatos on different aspects of Popper's philosophy that were quite stable over his entire carreer. In other words, for Popper, it was always the case that a scientist must be like the dogmatic falsificationist some times, like the naive falsificationist other times and as the (partial) sophisticated falsificationist yet other times.  Popper did not explain that explicitly. Instead, Popper wrote that he did not want to enter into these terminological distinctions made by Lakatos and that Lakatos used them to misrepresent his intellectual history. Nevertheless, this analysis helps an understanding of the sources and comes very naturally when we do understand the sources.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 01:18, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Re:  I agree with that. Thanks also for everything else you said in this section, which is useful to think about, although I don't have any specific comment about it right now. I personally am not very interested in contributing to an article only about Lakatos, so I will continue to focus on preparing for a more general article. If you want to write an article on Lakatos, I would repeat that an article about his paper "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" would be more than justifiable and very welcome, just like there is an article about Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and indeed I think the latter article should also be expanded to summarize Popper's book in greater detail. Biogeographist (talk) 22:59, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Reusing the section Falsificationism in Falsifiability

message: As soon as we want to be general, we need to ask what is the difference between a large perspective on falsificationism and a broad coverage of the Quine-Duhem thesis, eventually larger than what is done in Quine-Duhem thesis?  My point is that the Quine-Duhem thesis (the two versions as described by Lakatos) covers most of the problems of falsification. Both subjects are attached to the Vienna Circle.  There is an important overlap. If you remenmber our previous discussions, you will see that I am not against overlap. I always argued that it's fine that almost the same subject is covered using different perspectives in different articles as long as it is not used to do POV fork, which is taken care of when the two articles refer to each other adequately, i.e., the readers can easily see the big picture. So, I am not asking the question in a negative manner.  I do think, however, that we need to clarify what is the perspective specific to this article and how it is different from a perspective that would be natural for a broad coverage in Quine-Duhem thesis. One way to create a distinction would be to use a focus on terminology, but then I would disagree. Dominic Mayers (talk) 23:35, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Difference between general falsificationism and Quine-Duhem thesis

message: On a related subject, in the specific context of an opposition to an excessive conventionalism, Popper warned against explanatory auxiliary hypotheses. This was misinterpreted by Lakatos as if Popper was fundamentally against explanatory auxiliary hypotheses. On the contrary, Popper's insistence on the importance of the logical side is a way of saying that the ceteris paribus clauses are important and we must use them to do science. Working on the logical side is similar to accepting the ceteris paribus clauses. To put it in another way, the logical side contains by default, without the need to state them, the ceteris paribus clauses. At the same time, Popper was fully aware of the methodological issues, of the Duhemian problem and of the problem of induction. He was also aware that he needed an evolutionary perspective, metaphysical research programs, quasi-induction, etc.  to explain the growth of knowledge. Dominic Mayers (talk) 12:40, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Link with the distinction logic vs methodology

message: The title needs to be specific enough so that it's clear that the article does not cover all meanings of falsificationism. I would have used falsificationism, but it would have been an invitation to cover all meanings of the term in the literature and it's better to have a clear focus. Yet, the title should not present a too narrow scope such as only one specific work of Lakatos. The concept that I wish to cover is the notion of falsificationism  that is often criticized and, unfortunately, also often inadequately attributed to Popper. This naive notion is not referred to by Lakatos only. Even Lakatos says that Kuhn refers to it.  The title "Naive Falsificationism" is not  perfect, because Lakatos used this term in a very narrow manner as different from dogmatic falsificationism. On the other hand, it's only Lakatos that used it in this very narrow manner. For many authors, naive falsificationism includes Dogmatic falsificationism. In fact, for some authors, naive falsificationism means what Lakatos calls dogmatic falsificationism and they do not discuss what Lakatos calls naive falsificationism. For example, I do not believe that Kuhn used the distinctions that Lakatos created.  "Naive falsificationism" as a title should be taken in its broadest sense. It would still be narrow enough.  I created a draft in Draft: Naive Falsificationism. Currently, it only contains a cut and paste of the section that exists in Falsifiability. It has to be adapted and extended to make it less specific to one work of Lakatos. I might even use the historical approach that  suggested, but addding the Duhemian problem as the primary context that precedes every thing. The only difference is that the objective is to clarify the notion of Naive falsificationism in its context, certainly including Popper's philosophy.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:09, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tentative title: Naive Falsificationism