Falsificationism, rebuttalism or falsifiability principle

The human intellect has the possibility of approaching the truth by carrying out a critical examination of the theories, that is, exposing them to falsification. The critical attitude commits the researcher to fight against the tendency to error. Criticism also commits the scientist to the use of simple language, devoid of any pretense that makes it difficult for the layman to understand the subject, which is contrary to the true nature of science, that is, the search for truth; the goal of falsification is to avoid scientific dogmatism and promote intellectual sincerity.

Scientific knowledge does not advance by confirming new laws, but by discarding laws that contradict experience. The scientist's job is mainly to criticize. According to Popper, only those propositions for which an experiment or an observation that contradicts them are conceptually possible should be admitted as scientific propositions.

Guillermo Lariguet examines the applicability of the Popperian falsificationist program to legal science, for which he deploys an epistemological strategy that allows him to reflect on what it means to do legal science. After a cursory examination of the basic components of the Popperian critical-rationalist program -which, as is known, has as a reference a science with empirical content and characteristically explanatory theoretical commitment-, the author notes the basic meta-theoretical disagreements that he encounters when trying to apply the falsificationist program to the dogmatic theories of legal science. Behind these disagreements are three directly linked issues that will be unraveled throughout the following pages. "First, the preliminary discussion about whether, indeed,so-called "dogmatic-legal theories" deal with "facts".

To admit that legal theories deal with certain facts, the second question, now, is to discuss - exhaustively - what kind of facts involves the "existence" of the rules or system of them in order to provide the truth conditions, in this case, the criteria for refutation of legal theories and, the third question, finally, is linked to the elucidation of what is the most "characteristic" theoretical task with which the work of the dogmatists in their knowledge of the Law can be reconstructed ". This last question is related to the need to carry out an analysis on the logical structure of legal theories. Finally, the author addresses doubts about the assignment of empirical content to theories built by dogmatists,reflecting on an alternative reconstruction of the falsificationist program that would allow it to be extended to the rational control of the practical debate.

Falsificationism

Forgery, rebuttalism, or the principle of falsifiability is an epistemological trend founded by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994). For Popper, verifying a theory means trying to refute it using a counterexample. If it is not possible to refute it, said theory is corroborated, and may be provisionally accepted, but never verified. Within methodological falsificationism, Popper's initial naive falsificationism and sophisticated falsificationism can be distinguished from Popper's later work and the methodology of Imre Lakatos' research programs.

Logically it is possible to deduce from it that it can be proven false by observation In philosophy of science, falsifiability is understood to be the property that is verified if it is followed, deductively, by modus tollendo tollens (from the Latin, thus denying denies), which the universal proposition is false when it is possible to demonstrate through experience that an observable statement is false.

In other words, falsifiability (refutability) is the property that a universal proposition will have if there is at least one empirical statement. If it is not even possible to imagine an empirically verifiable statement that contradicts the original proposition, then such a proposition will not be falsifiable (irrefutable).

What is the concept of falsification in Popper? It consists in: if we manage to demonstrate by experience that an observable statement is false, it follows deductively, by modus tollens, that the universal proposition is false.

What is the truth for the falsificationist? The truth has no objective, material dimension, it is a process of advancement, each time you discover things, you decrease the ignorance. The truth is all that process.

The problem of induction arises from the fact that something universal cannot be affirmed from the particular data that experience offers. No matter how many millions of black crows you see, it cannot be said that "all crows are black." On the other hand, if a single crow is found that is not black, it will be possible to affirm: "Not all crows are black." For this reason Popper introduces falsificationism as a criterion for scientific demarcation.

Popper actually rejects verificationism as a method of validating theories. Popper's central thesis is that there can be no ultimate scientific statements, that is, statements that cannot be contrasted or refuted from experience. Experience remains the distinctive method that characterizes empirical science and distinguishes it from other theoretical systems.

For Popper, scientific rationality does not require unquestionable starting points, since it considers that there are none. The matter is a matter of method. Although science is inductive in the first instance, the most important aspect is the deductive part. Science is characterized by being rational, and rationality resides in the process by which we submit to criticism and replace our beliefs. Facing the problem of induction Popper proposes a series of methodological rules that allow us to decide when we should reject a hypothesis.

Popper proposes a scientific method of conjecture by which the observable consequences are deduced and tested. If the consequence fails, the hypothesis is refuted and must then be rejected. Otherwise, if everything is verified, the process is repeated considering other deductible consequences. When a hypothesis has survived various attempts at rebuttal, it is said to be corroborated, but this does not allow us to affirm that it has been definitively confirmed, but only provisionally, by empirical evidence.

Critical rationalism or falsificationism

Popper's philosophical-scientific conception is often called critical rationalism or falsificationism. This name refers to a commitment to a rational attitude and to a characterization of the nature of knowledge based on the scientific demarcation criterion that excludes metaphysics as it is impossible to discover empirical facts that refute its contents.

The falsificationist method

For the falsificationists the scientist is an artist insofar as he must boldly propose a theory that will then be subjected to rigorous experiments and observations. The advance in science is to falsify successive theories so that, knowing what it is not, we can get closer and closer to what it is.

The hypotheses that the falsificationists propose must be falsifiable. This means that they must be susceptible to being falsified. To meet this condition, the assumptions must be as general as possible and as clear and precise as possible. A non-falsifiable hypothesis would be "tomorrow it may rain", since in no case can it be falsified ("tomorrow it may not rain").

A falsifiable hypothesis would be "the planet Mercury rotates in an orbit." A more general (and therefore more falsifiable) hypothesis would be "all planets rotate in one orbit." And a more precise (and therefore also more falsifiable) hypothesis would be "all planets rotate in an elliptical orbit."

The falsificationists always prefer the hypotheses or theories that are more falsifiable, that is, more likely to be proven false, as long as they have not already been falsified. Thus science would progress by trial and error.

Counterfeitingism relies on the hypothetical deductive method. Which is a description of the scientific method. In the hypothetical deductive method, scientific theories can never be considered true, but at most "not refuted."

However, it should be noted that Popper does not call his methodology falsificationism, but critical rationalism. This name refers to a commitment to a rational attitude and to a characterization of the nature of knowledge based on the scientific demarcation criterion that excludes metaphysics as it is impossible to discover empirical facts that refute its contents. The fact that he is currently known for falsificationism is due to the disseminators of his work, as well as the aforementioned distinction made by Lakatos.

Every theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis. Although many of the experiments may agree with the theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result of a new experiment may contradict it. Now, a theory can and should be rejected if it is found, even once, that an observation or experiment that contradicts the predictions of the theory that purports to be science.

Good theories are characterized by predicting a large number of results that in principle can be refuted or invalidated by observation or experimentation, thus, whenever a new experiment is found to be in accordance with the predictions, the theory survives and confidence in it increases, but if, on the contrary, a new observation is made that contradicts the theory, it must be abandoned, rejected or at least modified.

The falsifiability criterion

Popper establishes the falsifiability criterion to distinguish what is scientific from what is not. According to this criterion, a theory is scientific when, being falsifiable in principle, it is not actually falsified despite the fact that we have tried to refute it with all available means.

Permanent questions

For Popper, there are never enough reasons to affirm that society has to develop in a certain way whether its citizens want it or not. Since we can never be absolutely sure what the correct answers are to the questions posed to citizens, it is necessary to maintain the widest limits of freedom of criticism.

Democracy

Popper conceives of democracy as the system in which rulers can be replaced without resorting to violence. The two central questions of political philosophy are:

How can you avoid that the exercise of power is not based on social or political dogmas?

New hypotheses must be formulated to displace old ones through falsification. The fact that it can be falsified is what makes a fact scientific.

We can also find statements that are not falsifiable, such as "Things are like this" or "Soccer is like this". In this case they are infinite statements and cannot be denied.

Popper says that science is always close to reality but that they never come together. This is what makes science verification absurd. It does not have to be verified, what we must do is formulate new increasingly perfect theories.

Types of statements.- False but false statements:.

Ex: Barça always wins »(the next game will be falsified but it is false because on some occasion it has lost). This is also not science.

All scientific statements are falsifiable but they are not always false.

To be science they must be falsifiable but not false.

-Falsable but not false statements

Eg: "Batasuna never condemns the ETA attacks" - This would be science for Popper.

Newton's theories are threatened by the order in which the order of the solar system is established. It may affect your theories. A falsifiable statement would be the following:

«If I buy the lottery tomorrow you can touch me»

In this case it is infallible because it can or cannot touch you. It is based on something very hypothetical. For Popper, science must contain its own limits. The statements must be:

1.Falsables

2.Precise and clear

3.Bold and daring

Popper's idea about the scientific process can be summarized in the following scheme:

Problem-> Conjecture (hypothesis) ---> Forgery ---> New problem

Popper brings science into a new stage from the point of view of logic. It makes the difference between science that was done individually at home and between modern science that is developed in a scientific community, as a whole.

He says that it is not necessary to go out into the street to search indiscriminately, but first deduce and think where the facts that will help us to arrive at the theory can be found and then we will go and look for them but we will never go out into the street without having previously thought.

The falsificationist considers science to be a set of hypotheses that are put forward as essays for the purpose of accurately describing or explaining the behavior of some aspect of nature. However, not all hypotheses succeed. There is a fundamental condition that any hypothesis (or system of hypotheses) must meet in order to achieve the status of theory or scientific law. If it is to be part of science, a hypothesis must be falsifiable or refutable.

Although we cannot rationally justify our theories, or even prove that they are probable, we can criticize them rationally and objectively, seeking and eliminating errors in the service of truth, thus distinguishing between better and worse theories.

As Popper says: “We falsificationists prefer to solve problems by making a bold conjecture even if it soon turns out to be false because that is the way we can learn from our mistakes; and discovering that our conjecture was false we will have learned a lot about the truth and we will have come closer to it ”.

Popper's falsificationism is sustained by two things: in daring conjecture and in free criticism or critical discussion.

According to falsificationism, the course of science consists in falsifying theories (finding an observation that contradicts them) and proposing others that better resist all attempts to be false. But for all this to make sense, it must be possible to find a singular statement that is capable of falsifying the theory. If a hypothesis or set of hypotheses are to be part of science, they must be falsifiable.

Highly falsifiable theories should be preferred, provided they have not been falsified. The objective of every scientist will be to propose theories much more falsifiable than the current theories and to deliberately try to refute them. In this way science advances thanks to trial and error, it is a constant search where the falsification of an important theory becomes a great milestone because it opens the doors to risky speculation and bold conjectures that will advance science.

In summary, we could say that Popper's theses are quite different from the positivists' idea of science. For these, scientific statements are susceptible to conclusive verification; A statement is true if it passes a series of very strict tests. For Popper, it will never be possible to verify if the statements are true and therefore science will no longer be that procedure that allows us to describe reality correctly and without appeal. For the falsificationists the scientific theories are "simple" conjectures and assumptions that people freely create to try to solve the problems of the previous theories and provide an adequate explanation of some of the aspects of the Universe.

Once the theories are created, scientists have to work tirelessly to try to refute these theories by subjecting them to all kinds of tests. If one of them is falsified, it must be eliminated and replaced by a better one. The falsificationists will never assure the veracity of a theory, but they will be sure that the current ones are the best and the most useful that have ever existed.

The applicability of popper's falsificationist program to legal science

(According to Guillermo Lariguet, he comments that he finds it strange, however, that Popper's method has not received any application in law. Certain propositions about certain norms (of a legal decision, for example) are capable of being refuted (falsified) by the facts.

The general theory of law has so far wasted this criterion, despite being potentially fruitful.)

For this reason, he proposes to examine the applicability of the Popperian falsificationist program to legal science. It is an epistemological strategy that can be attractive to analyze the question of what it means to do legal science.

As is known, Kart Popper proposed the idea of falsification as a demarcation criterion between empirical science and metaphysics. The falsification of theories is part of an epistemological program of rational criticism that refuses to look for conclusive reasons that support the truth of scientific statements or theories.

The program of falsification of theories (PF) aims to solve two classic problems of the philosophy of science that are intrinsically related: the problem of what it means to do "genuine" science and the problem of "unification" of the sciences. This is so because, although the multiplication of sciences in disciplines is a feature of the intellectual scene with which we are familiar, Popper thought that the relationship between these two problems was possible on the basis of the unity of the method (falsification). All sciences, beyond their special domains, could be connected from this method.

As can be seen, the aim of applying to legal science (CJ) the basic components of (PF) has the purpose of extrapolating to it parameters of rational criticism that allow, on the one hand, the elimination of false theories and, on the other hand, to reconstruct certain theoretical tasks that legal dogmatics carry out - such as, for example, describing the existence of norms - as cognitive activities in an empirical sense.

This kind of reconstruction assumes that the problem of what it means to do (CJ) cannot pre-empt a consideration of its place in a global scientific landscape, in this case, the place of (CJ) in the global landscape of science.

The dogmatists of the law could eventually agree to this reconstruction and adopt as their own the mission of eliminating false legal theories from the bosom of the (CJ). But this agreement encounters problems.

This is so because they persistently disagree, on the one hand, about the facts that can refute their theories (empirical basis), and on the other hand, about the content and logical structure that these legal theories should have in order to be subject to scrutiny. of falsification.

Both questions are linked to the philosophical problem of reconstructing what it means to do (CJ), that is, theoretical tasks are those that best characterize the supposedly theoretical work that would be carried out by the dogmatists of law. In this sense, the various meta-theoretical interpretations of the (CJ) assign to it various theoretical tasks, this assignment depending on the philosophical assumptions that the interpretations in question support.

The science that has captured Popper's attention has been a science with empirical content and characteristically explanatory theoretical commitment. A theory, to Possess, is defined as a set of risky explanatory hypotheses, whose basic ingredients are built by a set of universal statements (laws) and by a set of initial conditions.

To test this theory, the empirical base must be configured in which those basic facts that provide the falsification criteria will be located. These facts that allow us to determine when an empirical theory is refuted or not, are part of the content of what Popper calls "basic statements", particular statements related to the existence of a basic fact located in a given time and space.

It is by means of these statements that theories are rigorously tested in combination with the modus tollens rule, for which general explanatory statements are systematically connected with them, that the theory resists rational criticism only that it deserves to remain rationally discussed.

From these basic components, a theoretical goal of law interested in applying the (PF) to the dogmatic theories of the (CJ) records the existence of basic meta-theoretical disagreements.

Behind these disagreements are three directly related questions: first, the preliminary discussion about whether, in effect, the so-called "dogmatic-legal theories" are dealing with facts. To admit that legal theories deal with certain, the second question now is to exhaustively discuss what kind of facts the existence of the norms or system of them involves in order to provide the verifying conditions, in this case, the rebuttal criteria. of legal theories and, finally, the third question is related to the elucidation of what is the most characteristic theoretical task with which it is possible to reconstruct the work of dogmatists in their knowledge of law.

Conclusions

From my point of view and according to the work I carry out in everyday life, in falsificationism we do not speak of concrete or true conclusions or truths, but rather of suggested opinions or refutations, speaking in the legal aspect in commercial executive trials, which is where I base my work experience, since we promote and initiate a commercial lawsuit, the judges issue an order that does not resolve the merits of the matter, but a part of it, for both parties and throughout the procedure until judgment we will find this type of resolutions that do not resolve the merits of the matter, even when there is either a condemnatory or acquittal sentence for both parties, which supposes that this is final and must resolve the merits of the matter,However, we cannot yet speak until this stage of the procedure for the firm and concrete resolution of the merits of the matter in question, because there are still other remedies that both parties may file (appeals, amparos) which will be resolved. by other instances and logically by other judges for the same reason we are using the famous theory of KARL POPPER falsificationism or rationalism (refutations), where we are not solving anything yet and we are left with the opinions that are not yet definitive.amparos) which are going to be resolved by other instances and logically by other judges for the same reason we are employing the famous theory of KARL POPPER falsificationism or rationalism (rebuttals), where we are not solving anything yet and we are left with the opinions that even they are not final.amparos) which are going to be resolved by other instances and logically by other judges for the same reason we are employing the famous theory of KARL POPPER falsificationism or rationalism (rebuttals), where we are not solving anything yet and we are left with the opinions that even they are not final.

These two situations of judges and litigants, are two models of legal science radically opposed to each other, which only share the object from which they intend to obtain knowledge:

In as much, that the litigant used the set of rules that are considered binding by the citizens who are governed by them, and that can be understood as the object on which the cognitive activity falls, its objectives and methods are, in principle, totally different. the litigant of law proposes its reform in order to make it morally and politically more acceptable, the litigant in law does not stop at that understanding of the meaning, but seeks to discover the origins and social functions of norms beyond what they themselves say, and openly proceed to their assessment once their relationship with that social sphere from which they arise and in which the methods and techniques with which the litigants in law obtain their conclusions, also include, together with the reasoning objectively,a reproach tending to disqualify the work of the legislator and to question its legitimacy.

Indeed, when the jurist (litigant) faces an interpretative problem, he will try to find out what the meaning of the law is, and for this he will have to refer to what the law presupposes. While that of the judges seeks to know the law as well and as accurately as possible to apply it in an objective and predictable way, resorting to the argumentative methods and techniques that have traditionally been proposed and used to reach an understanding of the meaning of the norms already the delimitation of its scope, the judges cannot accept the conclusions reached by a litigant in law who questions the foundations of legitimacy of the established law. The mission of the judges is to prepare the normative program of the law for its fulfillment and its application. Part thereforeof an unquestioned and unquestionable assumption: the moral legitimacy of the law in force on the basis, where appropriate, of the Constitution as the supreme rule of the State. For judges, law is precisely a dogma that cannot be disputed. Therefore it does not and cannot question the right, but accepts its validity as the theologian accepts the truth of the gospel. All these opinions or reasonings discussed here do not mean that I conclude or define in a concrete way but rather that this is how I interpret Popper's theory is a very personal reflective point of view that is open to criticism from colleagues as well as from great researchers in the legal area.For judges, law is precisely a dogma that cannot be disputed. Therefore it does not and cannot question the right, but accepts its validity as the theologian accepts the truth of the gospel. All these opinions or reasonings discussed here do not mean that I conclude or define in a concrete way but rather that this is how I interpret Popper's theory is a very personal reflective point of view that is open to criticism from colleagues as well as from great researchers in the legal area.For judges, law is precisely a dogma that cannot be disputed. Therefore it does not and cannot question the right, but accepts its validity as the theologian accepts the truth of the gospel. All these opinions or reasonings discussed here do not mean that I conclude or define in a concrete way but rather that this is how I interpret Popper's theory is a very personal reflective point of view that is open to criticism from colleagues as well as from great researchers in the legal area.All these opinions or reasonings discussed here do not mean that I conclude or define in a concrete way but rather that this is how I interpret Popper's theory is a very personal reflective point of view that is open to criticism from colleagues as well as from great researchers in the legal area.All these opinions or reasonings discussed here do not mean that I conclude or define in a concrete way but rather that this is how I interpret Popper's theory is a very personal reflective point of view that is open to criticism from colleagues as well as from great researchers in the legal area.