Critical Rationalism/Verisimilitude

nesf

I'm just curious about this and maybe some of the better read amoung yee might be able to help me. I've really only just started looking at this kind of stuff in any depth and I'm having trouble agreeing with one of the 'standard' counter-argument to Popper and a few pointers would be handy.


If I take it as in science I may only falsify theories and never verify them, and that theories may never be true, only approaching truth can you counter this with:

from the SEP wrote:

Such a view would preclude us from saying quite reasonably that we know that the Sun consists largely of hydrogen and helium. When we say ‘I know’ we are saying something defeasible. If later we discover that though what we said was at the time justified, it nevertheless turned out to be false, we would say ‘I thought I knew but I now see that I didn't know’.

Does this argument actually get around the above idea regarding our theories about objective truth or is it only a handy rule of thumb/get out. I'm not quite seeing how the above argument allows us to say that any statement is objectively true. It seems to me just to allow us to conjecture but use the word know instead of conjecture when stating them. I'm actually not quite sure how the above argument differs from saying that all scientific knowledge is conjecture open to only falsification not verification.


Or am I missing some basic point here or am I looking at this from the wrong perspective?