Popper does a Weasel

For me as a science major (note the careful choice of phrase), Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was exhilarating to read and frustrating to understand. The problem was that he had such good, strong, powerful ideas that it was hard to see where they failed.

He was the fellow who brought us the 'non-falsifiable statements are non-science' meme, thus inflicting decades of misery on both philosophers and scientists. For the former, the task of refutation was an itch that begged to be scratched, for the latter, head-scratching of the existentialist type was the problem.

He extended his philosophy to utterly refute Marxist theory, but in the end had to concede that whether scientific or not, humans did indeed often behave in certain ways. He was rather sore about the 'soft' or 'human' sciences, thinking of them either as proto-sciences — rather patronisingly, in the sense that if they worked hard they would grow up to be proper sciences (or 'Popper' sciences, I suppose) — or pseudo-sciences.

The main problem with Popper, of course, is that a true law of nature is impossible to falsify. Laws that you can falsify are laws to which you can imagine an exception. Some things cannot be imagined to have exceptions, and hence cannot be falsified. We would call those axioms, and if they could be modified to have exceptions, then we wouldn't know if the exception-making or the axiom-construction was the culprit.

And so, at the end of his days, Popper goes a-weasel. I must admit that he had us all going for a while though.