Refutation

Procedures to Confront a Theory With Evidence

The meaning of a theory’s being confronted by evidence is a contested topic, marked by various competing views. Because there are no very precise boundaries between these views and because the term R is embedded within falsificationism, it is helpful to map an account of these approaches. Moreover, there exists an open-ended discussion as to whether a basic translation between those approaches might be adopted to allow for a temporary suspension of the general problem of incommensurability.

Keeping this in mind, however, it may be claimed that there are several variations of four types of approaches on the sort of procedures used to confront a theory with evidence, namely, falsificationism, verificationism, confirmation holism, and pragmatism. These approaches differ in many ways. One of the most important differences between falsificationism, verificationism, confirmation holism, and pragmatism has to do with how each of these perspectives conceives the act of confronting a theory with evidence. Briefly, from falsificationism’s viewpoint, to confront a theory with evidence is formulated as testing this theory with certain possible results of observation that are incompatible with that theory. If observations show that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory must be considered as refuted. In a different way, verificationism posits that confronting a theory with evidence involves identifying propositions that can be verified by true statements based on observation. Therefore, confronting a theory with evidence is defined as the verifiability of this theory in terms of observation statements. The third approach, confirmation holism (also called the Duhem–Quine thesis), claims that for any putative falsification, it is always possible to preserve a scientific hypothesis by revising auxiliary hypotheses in its stead. Finally, pragmatism calls for practical decisions and practical arguments rather than for theoretical reasons or evidence to refuse or accept a theory.

These differences concerning what it means to confront a theory with evidence are related to other differences among these views. One such difference lies in their lines or criterion of demarcation between scientific statements and other sorts of statements—for instance, philosophical. From a different criterion of demarcation to R, that is, verification, Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to show that all so-called philosophical propositions were actually nonpropositions or pseudopropositions, in that they were senseless or meaningless. This idea involved a characterization of science as opposed to philosophy. According to Wittgenstein, all genuinely meaningful propositions must be fully reducible to elementary or atomic propositions; these are simple statements that describe possible states of affairs and can, in principle, be established or rejected by observation. To confront a theory with evidence means that the theory can be verified by statements based on observation. This implies that the propositions that legitimately belong to science are deducible from true observation statements; statements that may possibly fall within the province of science can possibly be verified by observation statements. These statements coincide with the class of all genuine or meaningful statements. According to this approach, therefore, verifiability, meaningfulness, and scientific character all coincide.

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