| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

The Search Continues, 1997-2004; Falsifiablity and verifiability

Page history last edited by Jackie Kinealy 15 years, 4 months ago

Summary of Today's Topic

 

     One indication of the existence of life on Mars is methane that was detected in the Martian atmosphere by one of the orbiters. Methane gas is destroyed by ultraviolet light within less than a hundred years, yet there was enough lingering in the atmosphere to be detected. Since Mars' atmosphere cannot protect against this or other kinds of radiation, scientists think there must be a renewable source of methane somewhere on the planet. Some possible sources that could produce it are volcanos and bacteria, though scientists have found neither active volcanos nor any bacteria anywhere.

 

Popper was a famous philosopher of science interested in the demarcation problem: how do we characterize science?  He came up with the principle of falsification/ falsifiability which says that a theory must be able to be proven wrong for it to be called science.  Popper's principle separates "science" from "non-science." Before Popper, proof of a theory was determined by the varification principle, which says that if a hypothesis predicts an observation and we then observe it, that hypothesis is correct. The varification principle is logically invalid and was replaced by Popper's principle of falsification.

 

There were four assumptions made about life on Mars after the falsification theory was presented.  

 

1.  The Martian objects must be too small to see, and that our equipment is sensitive enough to detect anthing that should exist.

2.  The life forms would eat organic materials. Since we have the record of only one planet's brand of life, the only way we currently can understand such a concept is by analogy.

3.  The lifeforms on Mars are organic lifeforms, in the way that organic life is presented on Earth. Also, there will always be the question if we had tested for all possible organics.

4.  The Viking landers didn't kill any life when they landed. It is possible the touchdown and perhaps the mere presence of the crafts may have elminated fragile life forms anywhere near them, so all the samples failed to show life. This continues with the paradox of how an observer impacts what he's observing and the dangers that creates for science.

 

These four assumptions about Martian life can be falsified, but that does not mean that they are necessarily false. 

 

In a related study, the Miller-Urey Experiment in 1953 found that you can form the biomolecules by sparking what was thought to be atmosphere. Sydney Fox also found that protein formation is not random and is instead governed by law by studying microspheres.

 

     These two theories, falsification and verification, are interesting to examine when the principle of plurality itself is evaluated.  In all of humanity's efforts to determine if "something else is out there," we are to this day only able to state with a small bit of certainty that there are no life forms on our moon or the planets of our solar system.  When considering how small our solar system is compared to the universe, it is all but impossible to delve to every corner of the universe to make the claim that there is no other intelligent life.  This provides the question: is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence a falsifiable or verifiable claim, or neither?  It seems to be verifiable but not falsifiable, which further proposes the question: is this endeavor a form of science?

 


Primary Sources

Moreover, by making thier interpretations ant prophecies sufficently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophecies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destored the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.

Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations, pp.33

 

The criterion of falsifiability is a solution to this problem of demarcation, for it says that statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations.

Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 39

 

Wittgenstein, as you all know, tried to show in the Tractatus that all so-called philosophical or metaphysical propostions were actually non-propositions or pseudopropositions; that they were senseless or meaningless.

Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 39

 


 

Key Terms, Definitions, and People

 

Demarcation Problem - An idea of Karl Popper's that asks what separates science from non-science. 

 


 

Relevant Links

 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

 

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/16478

 

http://postpositivism.wordpress.com/2006/04/06/the-logic-of-falsification-and-the-structure-of-scientific-hypotheses/

 

http://www.austhink.org/critical/pages/logic.html

 

http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/METHANE/Methane.html

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.