Popper on the Air

By -
Here.

I started playing this audio in my house. About 15 seconds in, my 10-year-old son said, "But isn't Popper's idea that scientific theories can't be proven true just a theory, so that it can't be proven true either?"

"Yes, Eamon," I said, "fifteen seconds is about the right length of time needed to dismiss Popper."

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:13 AM

    Eammon is right but that doesn't make Popper wrong !!!

    Julius

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike8:51 AM

    Oh, I'm going to point Tony Hollick from the LeftLibertarian2 group here and watch the fun. He's a bit of a Popper fan boi and slightlyly mentally unstable (redundant, I know...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stephan Kinsella11:37 AM

    Gene, I don't detect a note of sarcasm in your reply to Eamon, do I? :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah10:01 PM

    I love to get my English Popperian friends worked up. I'm of course grossly exagerating -- Popper should be taken seriously for longer than 15 seconds! -- but I do think Eamon got a key argument against Popper right -- either the claim that justifying a theory is impossible is justified, and self-refuting, or it's not, in which case why can't I just adopt a different standard?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stephan Kinsella9:40 AM

    Oh, I agree, Eamon's argument is correct. But I was not aware you were a proponent of Hoppeian style arguments by contradiction--this one is similar to the criticism made by Hoppe of Popper (see e.g. http://www.mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae3_1_16.pdf ) and also similar to Hoppe's argumentation ethics which you are a critic of.

    ReplyDelete
  6. gcallah6:45 PM

    I am fine with argument by contradiction -- when it works! See the article by Bob and me in the JLS for why Hoppe's argumentation ethic doesn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous6:20 PM

    It was actually about a minute, Gene.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous12:39 AM

    Welcome to our game world, habbo credits , habbo gold , habbo coins , buy habbo gold and cheap habbo credits , they are very interesting.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more