| | | There are two areas of disagreement between epistemological theories of science
- “Demarcation criteria” - rules of acceptance of a theory
- “Elimination” - falsification and rejection of a theory
The time-honored empirical criterion for a satisfactory theory was agreement with the observed facts.
- Justificationism values “confirming” instances of a theory, an inductivist approach.
- Naive Falsificationism stresses “refuting” instances
- Sophisticated Falsificationism's crucial element is whether the new theory offers any novel, excess information compared with its predecessor and whether some of this excess information is corroborated.
Sophisticated methodological falsificationism's empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Sophisticated methodological falsificationism disagrees with Naive Falsificationism. It denies that:
- In the case of a scientific theory, our decision depends upon the result of experiments. If these confirm this theory, we may except it until we find a better one. If they contradict the theory, we reject it.
- What ultimately decides the fate of a theory is the result of the test, i.e., an agreement about basic statements.
Contrary to naive falsificationism, no experiment, experimental report, observation statement or well-corroborated low-level falsifying hypothesis alone can lead to falsification. There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
With this the distinctively negative character of naive falsificationism vanishes; criticism becomes more difficult, and also positive, constructive. If falsification depends on the emergence of better theories, on the invention of theories which anticipate new facts, then falsification is not simply a relation between a theory and the empirical basis, but a multiple relation between competing theories, the original "empirical basis," and the empirical growth resulting from the competition. Falsification thus has a "historical character". Paradoxicaly to a naïve falsificationis some of the theories which bring about falsification are frequently proposed after the "counterevidence".
The epistemological theory of Sophisticated Falsificationism the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of Naive Falsificationism. The very term “counterevidence” has to be abandoned in the sense that no experimental result can be interpreted directly as “counterevidence”. If we still want to retain this time-honored term it must be redefined like this:
“Counterevidence” to a theory T1 is a corroborating instance of theory T2 (that is, it holds a superset of the unrefuted content of T1) which is either inconsistent with or independent of T1. This shows that "crucial counterevidence"—or "crucial experiments"—can be recognized as such among the scores of anomalies only with hindsight, in the light of some superseding theory.
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