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Philosophy

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  • I'm not following your logic completely, but I think you might have stumbled upon Hempel's paradox. Commented Mar 9, 2017 at 20:15
  • That being said, Falsificationism faces bigger problems than Hempel's Paradox. See Kuhn, Quine, and Feyerabend. Commented Mar 9, 2017 at 20:19
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    The "logical" steps are quite confusing... but the argument is sound. The Discovery of Neptune followed exactly this pattern: instead of leaving the seemingly confuted Law of Gravitation, Le Verrier predicted the existence of a new unobserved planet. In a certain sense, the "observed fact" regarding the number of planets was discarded in place of the general hypothesis. Commented Mar 9, 2017 at 21:13
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    Observations are statistical and assume ceteris paribus clauses, so yes, observation (interpreted as) ¬q can be "false". I think the problem you are pointing out relates to the inversion of conditional probabilities in significance testing: estimated is not the probability of the hypothesis given the data, but rather the probability of the data given the hypothesis. This is indeed criticized, but alternatives (like Bayesianism) are not exactly better, see Fisher vs. Popper vs. Bayes. Commented Mar 9, 2017 at 21:58
  • When you replace W(x) with H^p, it's not clear what H and p represent. This looks like Duhem's argument in La théorie physique [trans. as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory]: When we test a hypothesis H, we typically rely on a set of other assumptions (about how our instruments are working, that nothing's interfering with the experiment, etc.), p. The conjunction H^p implies the expected observation q. So when we observe not-q, we can't conclude not-H. See SEPh article on underdetermination: plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/…. Commented Mar 9, 2017 at 23:35