Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
The problem with this view is the one you bring up here. According to the arguments of Quine and physicist Pierre Duhem, any observation can be made consistent with a scientific hypothesis if you change enough of your background assumptions. Thus, it would seem that you can't falsify any particular hypothesis by appeal to empirical observations because the hypothesis can be made consistent with those observations if you change enough of your background assumptions.
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Good point. Folks need to realize that we are not falsifying the hypothesis in a vacuum, rather we are falsifying a proposition that consists of the hypothesis and set of assumptions. When we change anything in the {hypothesis + assumptions} we now have a new proposition.
This is made pretty obvious when someone gives justification for why the seeming falsification does not invalidate the hypothesis.
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An interesting question is the rate at which bad propositions can be correctly discarded relative to the size of the entire proposition space.
It seems that humans use heuristics (intuition, common sense) start the process by sorting the proposition space from most likely to be true to least likely to be true.
The cool scientific discoveries are things that in the recent past were considered to be unlikely to be true. E.g. special relativity.
Presumably there is some non-null set of propositions which are today considered ridiculous that are actually true.
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