Lecture List - Galileo and Einstein:
https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/lectures/lecturelist.html
Galileo probably did more than any other figure of history to incorporate philosophy into the modern scientific paradigm. He used both logical arguments and mathematical models to invalidate, or falsify, certain statements of Aristotle concerning the motion of falling bodies, speed of motion, etc. He argued that the earth orbits the Sun based on a mix of experimental observations and logical arguments. Kepler understood that data for planetary forward and retrograde motion could fit into a Ptolemaic model with epicycles but the same data could also fit into or transform to another model for eliptical orbits without the use of epicycles. It seems the best scientists are applied philosophers who try to fit concepts with perceptions into better or more coherent models in some perceptive context.
Karl Popper refers to a hypothesis that can be falsified as a falsifiable hypothesis:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
Psychoanalysis did not contain any falsifiable or predictive hypothesis according to Popper. The idea that science is or should be limited to testing falsifiable statements has been criticized by many philosophers.
These factors combined to make Popper take falsifiability as his criterion for demarcating science from non-science: if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all such observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified solely to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific. However, Popper is not a positivist and acknowledges that unscientific theories may be enlightening and that even purely mythogenic explanations have performed a valuable function in the past in expediting our understanding of the nature of reality.
For Popper the central problem in the philosophy of science is that of demarcation, i.e., of distinguishing between science and what he terms “non-science” (e.g., logic, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and Adler’s individual psychology). Popper is unusual amongst contemporary philosophers in that he accepts the validity of the Humean critique of induction, and indeed, goes beyond it in arguing that induction is never actually used in science. However, he does not concede that this entails scepticism and argues that the Baconian/Newtonian insistence on the primacy of “pure” observation, as the initial step in the formation of theories, is completely misguided: all observation is selective and theory-laden and there are no pure or theory-free observations. In this way he destabilises the traditional view that science can be distinguished from non-science on the basis of its inductive methodology. In contradistinction to this, Popper holds that there is no unique methodology specific to science; rather, science, like virtually every other organic activity, consists largely of problem-solving.
