Karl Popper Defarcation Essay

Philosophers Rudolph Carnap and Karl Popper each devised their own methods attempting to distinguish scientific theories from non-scientific ones. They both agreed that a criterion of demarcation was needed to make this distinction, yet they each came about doing so in different ways. Beginning with Carnap, he proposed the idea of verificationism as a criterion of demarcation, which held that a theory is scientific if and only if it is directly or indirectly testable in principle. Otherwise, it is not scientific. It also held that only theories found to be scientific could be verified and therefore be meaningful, and non-scientific theories could not be verified and are therefore meaningless. Popper’s demarcation criteria stated that a theory is scientific if it contains

Popper disagreed with this entirely and claimed one should not rely on the success of past observations to corroborate a hypothesis. He believed that a scientific theory should restrict or forbid a set of possible outcomes, and therefore it can be put to test and falsified but never conclusively verified. Popper’s idea of falsifiability states that a theory is never actually proved to be true, rather a theory is accepted because it is the best explanation available until a newer and better one replaces it. On the other hand, Carnap believes that theories are a way of explaining the world and that each singular observation or experiment that corroborate the predictions of a theory contribute to the verification and truthfulness of that theory, and each new theories replace older ones because they offer better explanation of the world in which we live. This is a problem according to Popper because in his opinion, it is not logical how science moves forward on the basis of only the success of previous tests and