Following on from yesterday’s short thread on the paper demonstrating that under a Bayesian conception of evidence strength we are much less likely to find strong arguments than weak ones, Popper’s sense that confirmation means nothing if we haven’t sought to falsify a theory because we can *always* find confirming evidence is apt only if we allow that evidence to be arbitrarily weak ….. #philosophy
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“The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations. For if we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmation, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favour of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.”
