Theory i experience justification makes worse marxist freudian

Text	what makes one theory better or worse than another? The Marxist and the Freudian can always find a way to describe new experience as validations of their pet theory. Since all experience "verifies" their theory, these theories seem strong. But that's exactly the problem. It's hard to conceive what counterexamples to certain conjectures would even look like. Because some theories are so slippery and flexible that they never genuinely risk refutation. When you writer “As to why science insists only on the empirically verifiable I can only guess that it provides a justification for hypotheses,” this seems to me to evade the question. Why is justification understood in terms of (1) the ease with which a theory could be falsified and (2) its survival of attempts to falsify it. I suggest, respectfully, that “verification” is the wrong word here, since from the Popperian view that I am concerned with here no theory is ever verified. Have you examined Popper’s theory in his own words? I suggest that it’s more sophisticated than the traditional understanding of inductive science, which of course is one of its virtues. At the other end of the spectrum from the falsifiable theory is the "Just So" Story.

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what makes one theory better or worse than another?

The Marxist and the Freudian can always find a way to describe new experience as validations of their pet theory. Since all experience "verifies" their theory, these theories seem strong. But that's exactly the problem. It's hard to conceive what counterexamples to certain conjectures would even look like. Because some theories are so slippery and flexible that they never genuinely risk refutation.

When you writer “As to why science insists only on the empirically verifiable I can only guess that it provides a justification for hypotheses,” this seems to me to evade the question. Why is justification understood in terms of (1) the ease with which a theory could be falsified and (2) its survival of attempts to falsify it. I suggest, respectfully, that “verification” is the wrong word here, since from the Popperian view that I am concerned with here no theory is ever verified. Have you examined Popper’s theory in his own words? I suggest that it’s more sophisticated than the traditional understanding of inductive science, which of course is one of its virtues.

At the other end of the spectrum from the falsifiable theory is the "Just So" Story.

Tags: fallacies

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