Talk:The Logic of Scientific Discovery

"Falsification also comes to replace convention as a marker of the problem of demarcation."
I've removed this sentence. It seems to be a perfectly legitimate bit of technical jargon in the academic study of the philosophy of science, but without any cross links or "see also's" to explain it or give context, it is meaningless to me and probably to the average reader.

Please discuss here. It should be linked and expanded before any reinsertion.

Dpbsmith (talk) 14:27, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Working on adding some of this content.Oceanflynn (talk) 22:56, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

'All swans are white' Carnap vs Popper
In a 1954 paper Popper sought to point out serious erroneous arguments by Carnap, John Maynard Keynes, H. Reichenbach. which he later elaborated in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

In his 1950 publication, Rudolf Carnap used the example phrase, "All swans are white" to illustrate what he called an 'unrestricted simple law' - a sentence that "speaks in a purely general way about the individuals of the system in question without referring to any particular individual." Carnap's 'unrestricted simple law' is likened to Popper's use of 'All swans are white' as a 'strictly universal statement.' When This is distinguished from restricted simple laws which apply "to all individuals with the exclusion of some specified individuals," e.g., "With the exception of a certain kind of swan found only in Australia, all swans are white."

Popper used the example of the black swan in his argument on falsifiability in The Logic of Scientific Discovery invoking David Hume.

""The answer to this problem is: as implied by Hume, we certainly are not justified in reasoning from an instance to the truth of the corresponding law. But to this negative result a second result, equally negative, may be added: we are justified in reasoning from a counterinstance to the falsity of the corresponding universal law (that is, of any law of which it is a counterinstance). Or in other words, from a purely logical point of view, the acceptance of one counterinstance to 'All swans are white' implies the falsity of the law 'All swans are white' - that law, that is, whose counterinstance we accepted. Induction is logically invalid; but refutation or falsification is a logically valid way of arguing from a single counterinstance to - or, rather, against - the corresponding law.This shows that I continue to agree with Hume's negative logical result; but I extend it.This logical situation is completely independent of any question of whether we would, in practice, accept a single counterinstance - for example, a solitary black swan - in refutation of a so far highly successful law. I do not suggest that we would necessarily be so easily satisfied; we might well suspect that the black specimen before us was not a swan.""

- Karl Popper "The Problem of Induction" The Logic of Scientific Discovery

'Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 German original'
I don't think that statement is correct. A rewrite suggests significant changes to the original. But LoSD is a direct translation - Popper even states in the translators' notes:

""The original text of 1934 has been left unchanged for the purpose of the translation. As usual, the translation is a little longer than the original. Words and phrases for which no equivalent exists had to be paraphrased. Sentences had to be broken up and rearranged — the more so as the text to be translated was highly condensed: it had been drastically cut several times to comply with the publisher’s requirements. Yet the author decided against augmenting the text, and also against restoring cut passages [except for a few words indicated by square brackets or footnotes].""

- K. Popper "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", p.xii

Dahauns (talk) 22:02, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Hmm I don't know... The following paragraph explains that the English version adds appendixes and notes with corrections, expansions, and author's changes of mind, so maybe the base text was only translated, but I'm not sure about the whole product. Certainly it would have been a second edition if the original had been in English and all the new material had been incorporated into the main text. --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 00:42, 9 August 2020 (UTC)