To Falsify or not to Falsify :: Science Scientific Essays

To Falsify or not to Falsify Consider for a moment the views of Hellenic and Hellenistic science. Hellenic science was a science of the big picture. Science which often overlooked small details. Hellenistic science, on the other hand, was much more mathematical and precise. The shift from Hellenic to Hellenistic science was nothing more than a change of perspective in science. Right or wrong aside, scientist's perspectives changed and along with it what was allowed to be scientific. To quote Khun, "What is it that transforms an apparently temporary discrepancy into an inescapable conflict. How can an conceptual scheme that one generation admiringly describes as subtle, flexible, and complex, become for a later generation merely obscure, ambiguous, and cumbersome?"(Khun 76) Whether we like it or not, science is subjective. There are certain universal standards of science that all fields must follow, such as the empirical method, but among the different scientific fields science changes. What works in one field may not work in another. Sir Karl Popper claims "The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability."(Popper23). He then states "Induction, i.e. inference based on many observations, is a myth" (Popper25). This produces problems for certain fields of science.. His theory accounts for the "hard sciences", chemistry, physics and astronomy, but not for the "soft sciences". These soft sciences deal with different set of limitations and problems. Many so called "pseudo-sciences" deal with people, not constant non-sentient bodies. In these sciences, the variables are limitless and the best predictions scientists can produce are probabilities. So what about other sciences such as psychology, sociology, meteorology, and medicine? There are numerous fields of science that deal with probability and correlation's, which are part of the inductive method of science. What's there to say to these fields? For these sciences induction must remain valid when deduction is not possible. In the "hard sciences", such as chemistry, physics, and astronomy, deduction is applicable to the validity of a theory, and therefore deduction can be used to accurately falsify a theory. The soft sciences require induction for theory verification as well as deduction. Since I am a psychology major, I will use psychology and sociology to refute Poppers claims of falsifiability. The examples that I give are done with the scientific method. When necessary, random samples are used and confounding variables are negated. These studies were done within scientific guidelines.