Comment by belter
4 months ago
It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science.
Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...
> It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science.
And if the source of that framework is not (part of your definition of) science, how do we know whether that framework is true?
That was sort of my point: Poppers criterion is nice, but only works for a small subset of (natural) science - and even there has to face criticism because it is simply too naive for many edge cases.
Popper’s rule is not falsifiable for the same reason a definition can’t define itself. Falsifiability judges claims, not the rules for judging claims. Mixing those levels is like asking whether the rules of chess can checkmate themselves.
In category theory terms, it’s a type error, applying a rule defined within a system to the meta-level that defines the system itself.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/object-level-and-meta-level
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatheory