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Notes -
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists by David Stove. It's pretty crazy how everyone just sort of nodded along as Popper's falsificationism became the dominant idea in philosophy of science, but hardly any scientists act as though they actually believe in it, because it's absurd.
I'd love if you could elaborate on that sentence, I'm curious.
The fatal premise of falsificationism is the denial that inductive reasoning can be a basis of true knowledge. A theory can never be "confirmed", it can only fail to be falsified. Falsificationism preserves the veneer that science can be based on deductive reasoning alone. A theory that has been falsified is logically impossible to be true*. So one can attempt to define science in a crude way as the set of tested falsifiable theories that have not been falsified.
The cost of this is the denial of objective scientific truth. If general relativity were falsified tomorrow, would you feel comfortable walking out of a fifth-story window? Everybody knows gravity is real. It's obvious. Inductive reasoning works. We now have stronger theoretical justifications for induction than Popper did, but the damage is done.
*Kuhn does a good job of poking holes in this assumption. It's a shame he goes even further off the deep end of denying objective truth.
I think this is false. (heh)
If general relativity were falsified tomorrow, I wouldn't walk out of a fifth story window because I'd still be aware of the obvious phenomenon of falling from heights. Intellectually, however, I might think "I wonder why I fall? That whole General Relativity thing seemed to offer a pretty good explanation, but ever since Quantumfreakonomics falsified it, I guess I just don't know why this whole "falling" things actually happens."
Moreover, I think you may have pulled a fast one by slipping in "objective scientific truth" into your sentence. Popper's problem of demarcation (with falsifiability following from it) are designed as ways to differentiate between science and non-science (especially metaphysics). Falsifiability has to do with logical falsification, less than experimental falsification (although Popper did say it would still retain its validity to some extent within experimentation). All of this phrased differently; falsifiability isn't about being the truth finding tool, rather, it's about evaluating the proposed routes to truth for their scientific (really, logical) validity.
So, your assertion that "The fatal premise of falsificationism is the denial that inductive reasoning can be a basis of true knowledge" I think isn't quite playing nice. "True knowledge" can come from a variety of sources; metaphysics, theoretical physics, pure math, the scientific method, some (including me!) would also add in faith. Popper, I think, would call many of these things non-science but not non-valuable.
And I think this is very important because if we're fighting over what is or is not "science" it follows to ask why defining "science" is so imporant to which it is often responded "science is the only way we can find the capital-T Truth!" which really gets my ears perked up because that's how we, eventually, get coerced into "Following The Science" (what Taleb would call "scientism") and then we end up veering steeply away from Truth.
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