Human Knowledge, Reliability and Fallibilism by Mariano Artigas

In doing some research on my next post I came across an essay by  Mariano Artigas.  Although not intended as such, it is an eye opener to the various ways contrarians have been able to misrepresent Popperian philosophy with their disingenuously contorted "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements" argument.

I am reposting the following essay complete and unaltered {except for adding paragraph #s, some line breaks and highlights} and hope some will find it informative and helpful in their own educational process.

For a look at Mariano Artigas' larger body of work regarding Popper visit:

The Ethical Roots of Karl Popper's Epistemology

http://www3.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti/artigas.htm. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

This article appears at the website of the 
University of Navarra | Group of Research on Science, Reason and Faith (CRYF) 
http://www.unav.es/cryf/english/conocimientofiablidadyfalibilismo.html

Reposted under authority of CreativeCommons license NC-ND3.0 
along with much thanks to the University of Navarra.

"Human Knowledge, Reliability and Fallibilism"

by Mariano Artigas 
Napoli, 1992

¶1  One of the main subjects that we must face when we consider the image of man in our scientific age is the value of human knowledge which, in its turn, appears to be strongly dependent on our evaluation of empirical science. In this context, questions about the reliability of science occupy a central place. Jürgen Habermas has written that if we were to reconstruct the philosophical discussion of modern times as a judicial process, the only question that should be decided would be this: how can we obtain reliable knowledge? [Habermas 1968, p. 11].

¶2  It is well known that fallibilism is one of the main ideas of the Popperian philosophy and that it implies the negation of any kind of reliability.

necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements

I finally got around to revisiting the "Climate Science Falsifiability" discussion at OurChangingClimate.wordpress.com

to see where it leads.  It's pretty wild and there's no keeping up with K so I thought I'd take it from the top to review where this discussion began.

To start with some quotes from Hans Custers' article:

A very, ehhrmm… interesting piece on  

Variable Variability, Victor Venema’s blog: Interesting what the interesting Judith Curry finds interesting. And I don’t mean interesting in a rhetoric, suggestive way; I mean it is a well-written and well-reasoned article, worth reading.  

Victor writes about the meme regularly used by the anti climate science campaign, often supported by some straw man arguments, that the science of human impacts on climate would not be falsifiable. He shows it’s nonsense, by giving some examples of how it could be falsified. Or, more likely, already would have been falsified, if the science would be wrong. Victor’s post inspired me to think of more options to falsify generally accepted viewpoints in climate science. If there are any ‘climate change skeptics’ who want to contribute to real science, they might see this as a challenge. Maybe they can come up with a research proposal, based on one of the options for falsification. Like proper scientists would do. 

First, a few more things about falsifiability in general. Bart wrote a concise post about the subject four years ago, explaining that a bird in the sky does not disprove gravity. What looks like a refutation at first, might on second thoughts be based on partial or total misunderstanding of the hypothesis. Natural climate forcings and variations do not exclude human impacts. Therefore, the existence of these natural factors in itself, cannot falsify anthropogenic climate change. A real skeptic is cautious about both scientific evidence and refutations. 

{...}

One more thing. The philosophical principle of falsifiability and the feasibility of tests for it are two different subjects. ... Philosophy of science does not set a time frame for hypotheses testing. The issues involved in the testing of hypotheses are the story of almost every scientist’s life. They’re not sitting back, thinking of new and brilliant ideas, most of the time. Instead, they are busy digging for data, messing with measuring equipment, or evaluating errors in experiments. For climate scientists, one of the major issues is the pace at which they can get new information: one year of data every year. And one year of data is not a lot for climate research. There are no test tube planets for climate experiments. ..."

That’s it for falsifiability in general. Here are the 10 way to disprove the human impact on climate:

1. A drop in global temperatures for some period of time to the level of 50 years ago or longer, without a clear cause

2. A drop in global sea level for some period of time

3. A strong rise or decline in the atmospheric CO₂ level

4. The discovery that climate forcings in the past were much larger, or temperature changes much smaller, than science thinks

5. Warming of the stratosphere

6. Major errors in equipment in satellites, measuring outgoing longwave radiation

7. Evidence of a substantial fall of relative humidity with rising temperature

8. A source of heat in the climate system that we do not know yet

9. A fundamental flaw in the scientific understanding of radiation physics or thermodynamics

10. CO₂ molecules appear to behave differently in the wild, than they do in a laboratory

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/is-climate-science-falsifiable/