Karl Popper's Ideas on Science and Pseudoscience

The famous philosopher, Karl Popper advanced his career in Britain, allowing consideration to the new ways that scientists were thinking about how the world. Subsequently, looking at different approaches that scientists like Einstein and Freud were using, Popper came to the judgement that not all scientific achievement was made equally. He ended up making a crucial distinction between science and pseudo-science and came up with the theory of ‘demarcation problem’ (Popper, 1962, p.2). In the process of learning more about Popper's problem with induction and demarcation, I believed he taught us volumes about the nature of knowledge itself, and how we can best test it, and challenge it, to bring us closer to the truth, but continuing to explore more about his work, I came to realize some minor expectations and faults with his ideas on confirmation and falsification.

Appearing at roughly the same stop in time, Einstein and Freud both made some valid predictions that they hoped would help us better understand the world. Freud, concerned with the individual psyche, predicted that our 'previous experiences' would have a heavy toll on a current situation of a person to their past (Popper, 1962, p.5). Meanwhile, Einstein patiently waited for a solar eclipse that could be able to disprove the general theory of relativity. Then there came Karl Popper, who observed these predictions with special interest. As the scholar he was, Popper learned about the ‘psychoanalytic theories’ (The linguist, 2019) Freud and went to lectures given by Einstein about the rules of the universe and Popper realized that these brilliant thinkers used different techniques. For example, Popper observed that Freud was able to make just about any data point work in service of his theory (Thornton, 2018). Freud was able to describe an individual’s intimacy problems in terms of being hugged too much or not being hugged enough in their youth.

Scraps of information to support Freud's theories appeared to be everywhere but Popper saw that Einstein was making a different type of prediction, as an alternative to looking backward and using previous data to forecast the present, he was looking ahead and predicting future states of relationships. Einstein's theory was risky, and Popper realized to be a great scientist one must take risks (Popper, 1962, p.7). As Popper being known as a risky philosopher, he began to understand the distinction between the science that Einstein and Freud were doing, which Popper rather referred to as pseudo-science. Over a hundred years ago, when Popper was embracing these results, no contemporary philosopher had captured what ‘science’ actual meant (The linguist, 2019).

Popper presented the theory of Falsification which, a theory should be refuted and concluded sincerely with a genuine amount of risk. He believed, a theory can only be falsified and cannot be confirmed. Popper's main idea is that conducted research which is accurate of a scientific essence that will have a hypothesis which will be then be disproved (Popper, 1962, p.7). It began with coming up with a theory that has incomplete information and then determines how to falsify it. Once the theory is labeled as falsified, it had to be discarded completely and then come up with a new theory. However, if the theory did not come up as falsified, more tests had to experiment until it became falsified. Popper mentioned how pseudo-science, explores information and evidence to confirm its claims, he firmly accentuates the need for 'risks in research', a scientist must have an open-minded and bold hypothesis for it to be proven false (Popper, 1962, p.4).

By this fact, it indicates that Popper sees something very uniquely special in what makes science truly a science, and not just pseudoscience. Because of this theory, science can have that flexibility to progress and move forward, with proving each claim to be false, it is one step closer to finding some claim which has an appearance of the truth. The main goal of this testing is not to confirm a theory yet to prove it is false. I agree to some extent with his theory since it helps set the foundation of most scientific experiments, but I believe that the majority of scientists don’t need a theory to be a hundred percent true to confirm that it is correct, it just needs to be good enough. Popper's theory distinguishes science from pseudoscience yet still ejects the whole concept of confirmation of theory in science (Popper, 1962, p.30).

With more scientific theories developed, Popper failed to accept the concept of Holism in his work. The idea of Holism is an idea of various systems that should be looked upon instead of a collection of parts. There were scientists like Duhem, who had objections towards Popper's falsifiable theory (Thornton, 2018). Duhem justified his reasoning against Popper by logically claiming if you test a theory and it fails, it is still possible that the theory is not falsifiable yet there could be a couple of factors which may be the reason for the test to fail instead of the general theory itself (PHL552 course reader, 2019). So, rather than neglecting the full theory, scientists should figure out specific factors that might be contributing to the problem and oversight that component. Even though, I agree with Popper's theory of falsification and how it sets the standard principles of a scientific experiment yet the notion of disregarding the whole theory if it is classified as falsified, immensely clarifies a scientific procedure of an experiment and theory. It is always feasible to find some way of bypassing falsification, in such cases by proposing ad hoc an ancillary hypothesis. Nonetheless, from the critic Popper got on his theory, he defended his work by contending that theory depends on factors that go through the falsification process since those are conjectures. Even though I agree with this statement, Popper yet again failed to acknowledge if these factors go through scientific tests then they will depend on the extra factors which will most likely result in more test failing. As a result, there is no justification on whether a theory is a hundred percent legitimate, we can perform many tests to prove a theory is incorrect, yet it still can be correct.

As we know, Psychology is known to be true science, having its place in both biological and social sciences. Popper's entire scientific theory goes by psychology and he stands against Adler and Freud's cases which shows his skepticism towards social sciences (Thornton,2018). Every proof can act as an affirmation to the cases and those cases could never be tested nor proven wrong. By this understanding, is where Popper claimed pseudoscience. However, throughout the years there is one idea of Poppers which was failed in the scientific community which is, psychology. As of today, it is known to be science and even though it does not have empirical results such as subjects like biology and chemistry, instead it has the study of observation and that of neuroscience. Popper claims that the study of 'psychology' is just observation based and there is no such case where you can test such claims. I agree that Popper is correct in the sense that there is no actual chance for entire falsifiability with empirical data yet in the case of psychology, it is defensible since, with all the clinical studies, observation and research, psychology is known to be true science rather than pseudoscience.

Falsification also holds an important role in Popper's explanation of David Hume's problem on induction. Popper follows Hume's theory which inductive reasoning cannot be justified, yet he disagrees with the concept that empirical proof is any way admissible to confirm the truth of scientific theories (Popper, 1962, p.14). Popper's perspective precise distinction to Carnap and Hempel, who is well-known to be logical empiricists which amplified the degree of confirmation (Hempel, 1945, p.4). Popper argues there are two reasons which correlate problems of induction, the logical and psychological problem of induction. Popper explains that a failed theory can directly be falsified while a successful theory insignificant to confirm the theory. His example of observing a thousand white swans has zero impact that the hypothesis 'all swans are white' is to be correct yet if one black swan was to be spotted than the whole theory would be falsified (PHL522 course reader, 2019).

Besides, Hume's psychological problem proposed that unobserved claims will follow the same claims as they did before, yet Popper neglects this proposal since it crashes between logical and psychology of knowledge. He introduced the notion of plausibility however, he still researched different forms to revise his work to deal with these issues since Popper was never able to contribute a proper definition of plausible. In my opinion, it has an acceptable balance between Popper's work and others. It allowed scientists to present trusted theories that have been tested multiple times.

Moreover, despite Popper having a few individuals who criticized his work, he contributed immensely to the philosophy of science. He was one of the most important and respected philosophers, who helped to outline the future work of science. Even though Poppers falsification study is not widely used in philosophy, it did hold a significant role in earlier years which helped for later endeavors, such as Feyerabend, Kuhn, and Lakatos (Thornton, 2018). His theory did not only play an important part within the scientific community but an important role in emphasizing the picture of science as an empirical work and how different scientific works are called pseudoscience. Popper’s work on confirmation and induction encountered reasonable critics yet he still justified by his theory of falsification. In my opinion, I give credit to Popper for sticking to his theory despite the critics but then again, he does play a role in contradicting himself. He would defend his rules on falsification repeatedly which would go against his theory so, therefore giving his proposal his theories would be classified was pseudoscience rather than science itself. In conclusion, I believe that Karl Popper’s theories are not to be fully disregarded since he has valid arguments even when others argue back which therefore guides others to more of an accurate ideology. There are can arguments made in specific instances that his theory can be questionable yet almost inarguably correct. These valid objections should be taken to account, so for the future we can conduct remodel and improve the ideas and theories.