The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #147391   Message #3451840
Posted By: TheSnail
14-Dec-12 - 12:41 PM
Thread Name: BS: Alternative to Science??
Subject: RE: BS: Alternative to Science??
Well, Steve, passing over your senior moment on the M6,we have a bit of you usual schoolboy style abuse, an ad hominem attack and a few questions of your own but absolutely no attempt to answer my question. (Heheh. Talk about evasive.)

Nevertheless...

you think I'm somehow opposed to Popper and his falsifiability.
... why it is that you suspect, .... why you think I don't adhere to yer man?


For a start, there is your recently unsupported claim that Popper "had to acknowledge his own reservations about it. That makes it a bit strange that, 12 years after Popper's death, Dawkins was emphasising the importance of falsifiability to justify the scientific status of evolution.
On a previous thread when I quoted a website on falsifiability you responded "utterly risible" "a load of pretentious old bollocks" "crock of shite". Doesn't sound like a very positve response.

Because (just like Popper - why don't you check?) that I consider that science is capable of yielding truths?

Nobody is denying that science can yield truths and Popper described science as the pursuit of truth with the proviso that certainty could never be achieved. That doesn't mean you can describe a theory as true. Perhaps you could provide me with some supporting references.
While looking for evidence, I did find some good Popper quotes -

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.


I have no way of knowing whether you had heard of hin before this and I doubt if you are going to tell us. There are two possibilities; either you haven't heard of him in which case you have a learning opportunity or you have and you reject what he has to say.
So who do we trust? Professor Sir Karl Popper, CH FRS FBA who has been decribed by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thus - Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. or Steve Shaw.