Abstract
In Chapter 3 the basis of Popper’s philosophy of science, including his notions of basic statement, background knowledge, and corroboration, were shown to rest on the Deductive Model, in which scientific laws are conceived to be universal statements of the form: (x)(Fx→Gx). And in Chapter 4 an Empiricist conception of progress was presented, also in terms of the model. In the present chapter it will be shown that Popper’s attempts to provide a conception of progress likewise rely on the Deductive Model, the basic difference between his view and that of the Empiricists being that, where the latter see succeeding theories as logically entailing their predecessors, Popper sees such theories as contradicting one another. Thus, for example, Popper claims that:
[F]rom alogical point of view, Newton’s theory, strictly speaking, contradicts both Galileo’s and Kepler’s … For this reason it is impossible to derive Newton’s theory from either Galileo’s or Kepler’s or both, whether by deduction or induction. For neither a deductive nor an inductive inference can ever proceed from consistent premises to a conclusion that formally contradicts the premises from which we started.1
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Notes
Popper (1957a), p. 198; see also Popper (1975), pp. 82-83 & n
Formally, this is due to the conception of theories as hypothetical statements. Thus. for example, (x) (Fx→(Gx & ⌉ Gx)) is contradictory only if Fx is assumed true for some x
Popper (1962), pp. 217-218
Popper (1962), pp. 218ff. Note that, as mentioned in Chapter 3, Popper’s notion of testability differs from his notion of severity of test
Ibid., p. 220
Ibid., p. 232
Ibid., p. 385
Ibid
Popper (1962), p. 397
Ibid., p. 218
Cf. e.g. Carnap (1966b), and Kneale (1964)
Cf. Keynes (1921), p. 225
Cf. Popper (1959), p. 364. The notion of relative probability plays a small role in the present considerations. This is so because what is being demanded of Popper is a criterion for determining the relative superiority of false theories; and all such theories (on any account in which they are conceived as universal statements) must have relative or a posteriori probability zero
Cf. Popper (1958), p. 192, and (1959), pp. 363 ff. & 373
Popper (1959), pp. 364ff
Lakatos too notes that theories’ having zero probability means that the notion of probability cannot be used to determine their content: see Lakatos (1968), p. 379
Popper (1959), p. 373
Ibid., p. 374
Ibid
Cf. Popper (1973), pp. 55ff
1 Cf. Popper (1962), p. 233
Although, as discussed in Chapter 3, Popper believes that no statement in empirical science can be determined to be true, he feels justified in speaking in terms of a theory as having certain true consequences thanks to the work of Alfred Tarski, to whom he ascribes a correspondence theory of truth: cf. e.g. ibid., pp. 223ff., and Popper (1973), pp. 44ff. For a critique of Popper’s interpretation of Tarski, see Haack (1976); for problems concerning the applicability of Tarski’s conception in the case of the comparison of theories, see Kuhn (1970c), pp. 265f
Popper (1973), pp. 47 ff
Cf. Popper (1962), pp. 391 ff
Cf. e.g. Popper (1962), p. 234
Cf. Popper (1972), p. 52. These definitions were deleted from Popper (1973), but were not replaced with alternatives affording a clear conception of how one of two false theories can have a greater verisimilitude than the other
See Tichý (1974)
See Miller (1974). 4-812581 Dilworth
This problem has come to be called ‘the paradox of meaning variance’. For attempts at its resolution from within the Popperian framework, see e.g. Giedymin (1970) and Martin (1971)
For similar comments see Kuhn (1970c), pp. 234-235
Though Ernest Nagel, for example, has provided an interesting discussion of the nature of scientific theories and the possible role played by models in them, he has not made a direct attempt to explicate how models might function in such theories when conceived as universal statements: see Nagel (1961), Ch. 6
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Dilworth, C. (1994). The Popperian Conception of Scientific Progress. In: Scientific Progress. Synthese Library, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0914-7_6
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