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Hey, you're listening to Part 2, the partially examined life episode 280.

Part 2, who've been discussing Lakatosha's falsification in the methodology of scientific

research programs.

He had been discussing the poppers, at least a version of popper, the dogmatic falsificationism,

which is probably how we describe popper.

But what he actually attributes to popper is something more subtle, which is this methodological

falsificationism, which I think is just captured by that he acknowledges, yes, you can't just

make a theory-free observation that could then refute an existing theory.

There's not that sharp distinction between theory and observation.

But when we're doing experiment, we do it provisionally.

We're assuming, for the sake of the experiment, that the cataractous parabist conditions hold,

that the background theory we're just going to take as given.

So we can only test one thing at a time, but that doesn't mean that later we wouldn't

turn around and try to test what we're right now calling given.

So that is, I think, for him strong enough to provisionally say this experiment, yes,

did definitively falsify thing, but at least the way Lakatosha depicts it is, let's put

...