Falsifications and scientific progress: Popper as sceptical optimist

Constants and scientific progress.

Scientists like constants (a personal favorite is Avogadro's number). It is no wonder, because not only does defining a constant represent a major scientific breakthrough, but as human beings we like things we can rely on, things that stay the same and that bring us consistency, stability, and a way to understand ourselves and the world around us. On the other hand, scientists create and welcom...

Scientific Progress, Verisimilitude, and Evidence

The verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS) is the view that progress can be accounted for in terms of the increasing verisimilitude or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth, of our theories. In this paper, I defend VS against the criticism, levelled by Bird (2007), that it exhibits an unacceptable lack of interest in the issue of the grounding of scienti...

Neuroeconomics: A sceptical view

Neuroeconomics has been hailed by its advocates as affording “ground-breaking” insights into human behaviour and significant theoretical advances through conceptual trading with neuroscience. The prospect of the discovery of the proximate causes of behaviour by measuring thoughts, feelings, and hence utility is, according to neuroeconomists, within reach. Thus, neuroeconomics will permit the co...

Social Explanation and Popper

Portrait of an optimist

I come from a family of lawyers. When I was growing up, the only scientist in the family was my uncle, who was a physicist. But I was interested in science, and as a boy collected rocks and kept my “chemistry cabinet” in a spare room at my father’s law firm in Rome where I smelled up the place from time to time with failed experiments. When I finished high school at the Liceo Classico Torquato ...