John Watkins on the Empirical Basis and the Corroboration of Scientific Theories

Abstract

In Chapter 7 of his Science and Scepticism on ‘The Empirical Basis’, John Watkins addresses one of the most serious difficulties confronting Popper’s philosophy of science. As is well-known, Popper’s methodology rests on a demarcation criterion according to which only empirically refutable propositions count as scientific.¹ This criterion arises from the asymmetry, in regard to scientific hypotheses, between verification and falsification. While such hypotheses are taken to be universal statements subsuming infinitely many states of affairs, their potential falsifiers (basic statements) are singular sentences. One is thereby led to believe that the impossibility of verification has to do with the (physical) impossibility of performing infinitely many operations; while the possibility of falsification rests on the possibility — at least in principle — of making finitely many observations in order to decide the truth-value of a basic statement. However, both in his (1930/31) and in his (1934), Popper goes out of his way to assert that observation, as commonly understood, namely as a process grounded in perception, bears no epistemological relation to basic statements.² Sense-experience may motivate or cause us to accept a falsifier but it provides no reason for doing so. Potential falsifiers can be and in fact usually are objective statements about the external world.