User:Dominic Mayers/sandbox/Notes on falsifiability

These are notes written about Popper's falsifiability.

Criticism of the third world
Popper approached the dualism objective versus subjective knowledge with two different perspectives.

Diverse notes
Lakatos mentions that Popper, in Open society and its enemies wrote: "in the case of a scientific theory, our decision depends upon the results of experiments. If these confirm the theory, we may accept it until we find a better one. If they contradict the theory, we reject it". This suggest naive falsificationism with a rule to justify the rejection of a theory. However, Lakatos note also that Popper already in 1934 in his original version Logik der Forschung of The Logic of Scientific Discovery wrote: "In most cases we have, before falsifying a hypothesis, another one up our sleeves", thus showing that Popper was not referring to a fixed rule that could be used in a justification method.

Musgrave seems to have rejected fallibility. This might be related to the notion that knowledge is justified true belief.

Watkins argued against Popper's notion that basic statements are tested.

Quine considered epistemology as a part of psychology.

Nicholas Rescher considered that induction must be accepted pragmatically without further justification and that knowledge is standardly justified true belief.

Kevin Meeker and Frederick F. Schmitt argue that even in David Hume we can see a view that knowledge is justified true belief. However, Kenneth R. Merrill rather says that Hume adopted a point of view similar to Hume who saw epistemology as a part of psychology. Moreover, Schmitt's view on "justification" is not a logical justification: in this manner there is no contradiction.

James Van Cleve consider induction can be justified if we restrict to the cases where we have uniformity of nature.

Rohit Parikh and Adriana Renero argued that the popular belief that plato adopted JTB as the definition of knowledge is incorrect. This is also a point made by Zina Giannopoulou.

Sven Bernecker and Fred Dretske wrote that after Edmund Gettier raised a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge no epistemologists found an acceptable variation on this definition. On the other hand, Paul Boghossian  wrote that JTB is the standard, widely accepted definition of knowledge.

Leemon McHenry on Maxwell and Popper
Maxwell rejects the widely-accepted view of standard empiricism that scientific theories are accepted or rejected solely by confrontation with the evidence. He believes instead that what is required to explain the progress of science is a commitment to metaphysical principles that underlie our notion that the universe is comprehensible.