The Logic of Scientific Discovery
by JS
At the beginning of the summer, I always plan on reading all the things I did not quite get to during other seasons of the year. Though I am often too ambitious, I am making some progress on a number of fronts. The first is Karl Popper’s landmark The Logic of Scientific Discovery. As I read through Popper’s ideas on the logic of science I am struck by how pervasive his ideas have become among the scientific establishment. No, that’s not quite right, his ideas are a pervasive part of our cultural view, not the establishment, of science. I’m not sure if Popper was the first to formulate falsifiability as a rigorous philosophical criterion demarcating scientific hypotheses, but reading his clear exposition of the concept certainly makes his ideas ring true.
I will note that one question Popper does not seem to consider is: “What makes a particular scientific pursuit interesting?” I’ve been struggling with this question in my own research, as I sift through a number of silos of work in machine learning and robotics, looking for both the big picture and the motivations behind each community effort. I do think it is possible to pose scientific questions that meet all the criteria of demarcation that Popper spells out, which fail as scientific questions simply because nobody else cares. Indeed, I think such “trivial” science actually comprises the near totality of posable scientific hypotheses. We don’t notice this because of a combination of our own bias and the natural selection bias that any peer reviewed scientific community uses as an organizing social and meritocratic engine.
Comments
Nice post! I get into Popper’s stuff occasionally with the AGW climate model question – is it science? or IOW “can it be falsified?”
There’s good stuff on this topic at one climate blog I frequent called the Blackboard. Just read a blog post there dealing with a withering critique of a paper by a German climate “scientist”; this paper was used by IPCC chairman (Indian guy, can’t remember his name), Gore and others recently to claim that current temperature trends are actually worse than models predicted. Contrary to the actual temperature trends which are flat or negative.
Turns out the German was using an end point filter which requires guessed future values on the temperature data that he “tweaked” to get this result. He changed the smoothing parameter from an earlier paper, because otherwise he wouldn’t get the “right” answer. And this was published in Science no less! Peer “reviewed” and all.
Absolutley disgusting what has happened to “science” in this case.
But i should really go back to originals of Popper and read it as opposed to Monarch notes versions on the web in Wikipedia and such.