Doppler and those white swans - aaaggh!!

onekeano

One of my kids is studying in college and was telling me they are having a hrd time getting to grips with this theory of "falsification" mainly in the form of Doppler and his white swan / black swan theory.


I've tried reading up on it but am just as confused eg.

"The Infamous Philosophical Swans

Knowledge is not advanced by the negation of falsely certain propositions. Take for example, the now famous philosophical example of the false assertion of certainty that "all swans are white". This descriptive proposition cannot of itself be an advancement of knowledge. Whereas the description that some are black is a contribution to knowledge since it distinguishes black swans from white and other possibilities such as pink or green. The finding of black swans is of value in itself. (Indeed science distinguishes itself from the unproductive ruminations of modern philosophers on classical texts by constantly producing novel and increasingly elaborate descriptions of the world and new explanatory theories.) In addition the finding of black swans says nothing about the previous existence of extinct pink, flamingo-like swans or the future evolution of finch-like green swans. The value of the description of black swans as a falsification of the unreasonably certain hypothesis that 'all swans are presently white' is almost, if not totally, nil.

Consider also the possibility that all black swans might have recently died. The constancy of falsely certain beliefs can therefore be another reason for their rejection. Certainty of either verification or falsification of hypotheses in the absence of complete and definitive evidence should be rejected. Even then, what appears to be 'definitive' evidence should always be regarded as provisional.

By contrast the formulation of non-constant less than certain propositions concerning non-constant complex systems such as living things can have value. Some swans might presently be a colour other than white, or might have been so in the past or might be in the future under different conditions. The verification of that hypothesis comes by finding swans of a different colour. "

It might be a long shot but if someone out there could throw some light on this for me that would be much appreciated as I am trying to understand what it means in laymans language.

Roy

Black Swan

onekeano wrote: »

One of my kids is studying in college and was telling me they are having a hrd time getting to grips with this theory of "falsification" mainly in the form of Doppler and his white swan / black swan theory.

Doppler? Perhaps you are referring to Karl Popper‘s discourse on “falsification?”

This Popper quote might be useful:

One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

To elaborate Popper:

Human knowledge is advanced by problem solving, and scientific theories (and philosophies) are educated guesses towards solutions to problems.

A scientific theory (or philosophy) must be stated in such a way as to be testable (and falsifiable if it fails the test). If you cannot test it empirically, it is essentially useless.

Caution must be used when testing scientific theory (or philosophy), as bias can occur when only supporting data are counted, and non-supporting data are either overlooked or excluded in favour of theory validation. Population delimitations (Swans only found in Europe today), sampling (How many swans will we count before we stop counting and assume representativeness?), and measurement (How do we determine colour white, and what if there are a few that appear a bit greyish or pinkish, what do we do?) can produce errors.

Because of the potential for bias in testing, it is a convention in the scientific method to test the null hypothesis (no support for theory), rather than to test the research hypothesis (theory all swans are white); and to the extent that your null is rejected empirically, the research hypothesis receives (cautious) support.

Scientific theories (and philosophies) are to be held with caution, and used so long as they receive empirical support; i.e., caution suggests that they may be revised or tossed out in favour of a better theory someday (therefore provisional).

onekeano

Brilliant - thank you very much, this is very helpful!

Roy

WalterMitty

youtube philosophy science. Some good lectures on there.

Trog

Tell him to look up TED lectures online, and this http://plato.stanford.edu/ is an awesome site. You can even quote from it in essays if you use the permanent links they give.

If his lecturer is french like mine was for the same subject then he's probably just getting distracted by the way he says 'falsification'.