Popper-ism and Science

Karl Popper eschews the descriptive and ``novelty'' portion of the inductive issue, attributing it to psychologism. ``the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.''

Popper quickly turns his attention to the testing of scientific theories. He states a necessity to understand and be able to move forward with a solid explanation of inductive logic in order to differentiate between a scientific theory, and ``the fanciful and arbitrary creations of the poet's mind.'' He states that the principle of induction must be a synthetic statement. According to Popper, this will not do; and neither will the probability logic, that he claims, many have adopted.

Instead Popper develops what he coins: deductivism. It would be used in the sciences in order that a theory may move beyond inductivism. This deductivism (in a nutshell) means that after a new hypothesis has been created (to advance science), it can only be empirically tested. After which time, the hypothesis can be said to be true or false.

This involves four major aspects:

1. the logical comparison of the conclusions among themselves
2. investigation of the logical form of the theory
3. comparison with other theories
4. testing by way of empirical application of the conclusions

The first denotes the internal consistency of the hypothesis. The second basically looks at the form of the hypothesis from a logical standpoint - is it tautological? If I came up with a theory: 2 = 0.5 + 1.5 many would laugh at the obviousness of it. In fact, it would not even fall worthy of testing due to the fact that it is nothing new (nothing that advances science,) which is the third - external consistency. The fourth is the actual application of what we have learned. In other words, what can be derived from this ``shedding of new light,'' (i.e.: practical applications.)