Category: .Smolin, Lee

Proposals for the scientific method

When verificationism failed, philosophers proposed that science progresses because scientists follow a method guar­anteed to lead to the truth. Proposals for the scientific method were offered by philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Paul Oppenheim. Karl Popper put forward his own proposal, which was that science progresses when scientists pro­pose thories that are falsifiable—that is, they make statements that can be contradicted by experiment. According to Popper, a theory is never proved right, but if it survives many attempts to prove it wrong, we can begin to have faith in it—at least until it is finally falsified. [296]