Question about Karl Popper

By well-wisher

Fri, 20 Feb 2015
  • 827 reads
2 comments
 

Karl Popper said that a scientific theory can be refuted but
never verified.

But say that two people, one who thought the world was flat
and one who thought the world was spherical travelled into space and both saw
that the world is spherical then, surely, one would have verified that it was
spherical and one would have refuted that it is flat; a verification would also
have been a refutation; by verifying that the world is round you’re refuting
that its flat and if the basis of a refutation is a verification of something
else then why is the verification any less reliable than the refutation?

 

 

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Comments

Submitted by Alan Russell on

Me thinks, just writing these few words did keep you awake a lot but I can neither verify or refute that.

Alan

Ringwood

Great Britain

Submitted by well-wisher on

Hi, Alan. Its because my sisters doing a philosophy course and she's writing an essay on Hume, Popper and Kuhn and sometimes the questions in her course spark of questions of my own and it just occurred to me that there could be certain situations where a verification IS a refutation such as the hypothetical one in my post.

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn