Karl Popper's Falsification

Science is based on fact. Isn't it? Karl Popper believed that human knowledge progresses through 'falsification'. A theory or idea shouldn't be described as scientific unless it could, in principle, be proven false.

Narrated by Aidan Turner. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.

From the BBC Radio 4 series about life's big questions - A History of Ideas.

This project is from the BBC in partnership with The Open University, the animations were created by Cognitive.

[nazaninkhalili]

Excellent introduction to Karl Popper's Falsification Theory

[MLucky]

As a current Honours Arts student who has been exposed to alot of other social science and political students too entrenched in their ideologies, I think it is really necessary for Philosophy of Science to be taught in the curriculum. It is very easy to be selective about evidence and interpreting the world through your own ideological perspective. Social science students need to learn some Popper.

[SuperBooboohaha]

Another  wonderful  educational  channel   on   you tube  ...  Knowledge  is   flowing  like  a  river   everywhere  ....blessed   to   live  in  this  internet  age

[TribesUnite]

Thanks for this great video ! Iv been sharing it a lot. People just dont get what the scientific perspective is - they treat it more as a religion unfortunately. I think its a matter of whether you are walking around with a question (?) or exclamation (!) mark in your mind. Science is both but fundamentally more of the former (unlike engineering of more applied subjects of scientific inquiry)

[cupcakekid]

If only they showed this to us back at A-level! It explains this far more clearly than my teacher ever did. It probably helped that it was Aidan Turner that explained it...

[foreveragainOK]

A good read is 'The Limits of Reason' overview of the shebang and hebang.  Also, going back a few decades 'Science is a Sacred Cow.'  Moo.

[leoalphaproductions]

This confirmation bias and pseudoscientific thinking is a huge issue in the area of sociology. And I'm absolutely shocked that no one ever addresses it. It's like the entire field and the academia around it is blind. It's almost like a cult.

[armenn]

Anyone knows about "A license to make TV"? Its an essay by Karl Popper. He also co-wrote a book with John Condry and Karol Wojtyla which should bare the title "Television, a bad teacher" or "Television, a danger to democracy" but there is no trace of that in English anywhere online. I found translations in French, Italian and Spanish under the names like, "Televisão: Um Perigo Para A Democracia", "La televisione cattiva maestra" or "Cattiva maestra televisione" but surprisingly there's no English. Any hints?

[Magnulus]

Marx couldn't anticipate Edward Bernais and the ability of capitalists to engineer wants and desires.

[oversquare]

Science is a method of evaluating evidence and there can always be more evidence - so science can't and doesn't "prove" things. Which is good because outside of the context of math and logic, "proof" is subjective and it simply means "I like my current position too much to think about it any more".

[Amalgafiend]

Science before Popper was never characterised as starting with Hypotheses. It was inducitivist which means that it started with data and then extrapolates from data to Hypotheses.

[callmeej]

That’s a good point I didn’t realize that the workers rebellion was un-falsifiable

[ric]

Converts from one position to one radically different always arouse my suspicions.

[MatheusHoscheidt]

This series is so enlightening. Keep it up ;)

[ixDye]

At 0:53 I thought my mans was about to hit that pipe

[starfishsystems]

This idea of falsifiablity was a refreshing one, and it produces some implications that tie in with what we can observe about the progress of scientific methodology. We can even apply ot usefully in daily life.

Suppose that I go into the kitchen and turn on the light switch, but instead of the light coming on as usual, nothing happens.

Most of us, me included, would probably try to change the light bulb and try the switch again. If the light comes on, the problem is solved, and dinner plans can continue.

But what really happened here? We ASSUMED that the bulb had failed, and after conducting the EXPERIMENT of replacing it, we CONCLUDED that we had correctly identified and fixed the problem.

Popper points out that NONE OF THIS METHOD WAS SCIENTIFIC. Yes, we've come away happy, but we may have gained a completely false understanding. The old light bulb may be perfectly fine, and now we're throwing it into the garbage!

Okay, so, "the light bulb isn't going on because the bulb is burned out" is a valid hypothesis. Why? Because it's falsifiable. But replacing it only shows that the new bulb works. It doesn't show that the old one is necessarily bad.

There's a missing piece, and it's critical. We'd have to put the old bulb back into the circuit, to show that it doesn't work even in what we now have verified (using the new bulb) is a good circuit.

See, there are other possibilities for why a light bulb might not come on. The power could be out. The wire could be broken. The switch could have failed. You could be flipping the wrong switch. Somebody could have drugged you.

Popper's insight was first, to see that all these alternatives have to be considered and possibly tested. But second, it's that under a regime of falsification, we're AT BEST left with one hypothesis standing.

And we might not have that. We could end up with multiple possibilities, unable to choose between them. Or we could end up eliminating all known possible explanations, a condition which has come to be called the Null Hypothesis. Then all we can honestly say is "we don't know." (But at least we know why we don't know, so it's progress of a kind.)

And third, that eliminating all the known competitors does not make the remaining hypothesis correct! It just makes it our best guess so far. New data may come in at any time to call it into question.

So, putting all of this together, what we have is, by construction, that scientific conclusions are always tentative. Whenever we REASON BY INDUCTION, from factual observations to some abstract principle, we're eliminating hypotheses which don't hold up to experiment in favor of those which do. We'll usually never get those excluded hypotheses back on the table.

But the door is always open to new ideas and new data, so WE NEVER ARRIVE AT ABSOLUTE TRUTH. There is no such thing, in any model of reality that we could ever construct. Our models are, necessarily, simplifications, and thus we always risk leaving something important out.

We kind of circumstantially knew this all along, but Popper dissected the process of investigation and showed how it must be this way. Verification, as when replacing the light bulb, may well be good enough for getting on with life. But if you are serious about approaching objective truth, your best path is falsification, and that only gets you so far.

If you really want absolute truth, you have to invoke axiomatic systems such as mathematics.

[sameersawdekar]

Karl Popper is hands down one of the greatest intellectual giants who turned upside down the way people view and experience things

[Ral]

Science do not look for confirmation, rater it looks after refutation of its own theories.

[mikelosey]

Really great video, illustrations were fabulous.

[theultimatereductionist]

I 100% agree with this video, even though I STRONGLY support Karl Marx's fight for workers' freedom and for Marxists' personal sacrifice and suffering for our nation & world.