Falsifying Popper

Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, most fully developed in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, seems increasingly to me like an offshoot of philosophical scepticism, disguised as a solution to the problems of scientific induction as described by Hume. It is a sort of exercise in negativity, a kind of deductive process carried out backward. Like Cartesian doubt, it partakes in casting a pallor of uncertainty over science and scientific progress; unlike Cartesian rationalism, Popperian falsificationism ends in an empty, destructive scepticism with no foundationalist follow-up. In any case, falsification itself seems to fail the test of philosophical doubt. Scientific theories are subjected to repeated tests not only to ensure the veracity of conclusions, but also to limit the effect of unwanted external influences upon general experimental results — disturbances occurring during measurement, impure substances, the dirt on a Petri dish and other, frequently unforeseeable but possibly highly-damaging experimental anomalies. Methods of measurement, observation and experimentation themselves are surely also theory-laden, and therefore subject to a certain degree of uncertainty. It is not difficult to see how methodological falsification falters in these respects in a similar manner, because experimental tests conducted to falsify a particular hypothesis leave themselves open to doubt to an equivalent degree; one might say they become theories in their own right, requiring repeated experimentation to verify their own negative hypotheses and limit experimental error, and perhaps consequently falling into the same inductivist trap that falsificationism was originally invented to avoid.