The Problems with Confirmation and their Solution According to Popper

A common practice in science is to propose a hypothesis, design related experiments, collect data, observe the result, and either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. Confirmation is the rational raising of one’s confidence in a scientific hypothesis. Usually, positive instances of the scientists’ hypothesis confirm their theory, while negative instances disconfirm, or falsify, their theory. Philosopher and scientist Karl Popper think that it is impossible for any scientific theory to be confirmed. According to Popper, science progresses only through falsification based on pure logic and never through confirmation.

For Popper, a scientific hypothesis is a theory with the logical possibility of empirical falsification. All ravens are black is a scientific hypothesis because if scientists observe a non-black raven, the hypothesis will be falsified. The hypothesis that God exists is not scientific because it cannot be empirically falsified. One of the reasons why Popper thinks that a scientific hypothesis can never be confirmed is the logical asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation: no finite number of observations can possibly verify a general hypothesis, but it takes only a single negative instance to falsify the hypothesis. There do exist theories that can be confirmed, like the hypothesis that all the pens on a certain table are black, which can be easily verified, proven true, or falsified just by looking at the pens on the desk, but such theories will be deemed too uninteresting to be taken into consideration by Popper.

A more fundamental problem with confirmation that Popper notes stems from Hume’s idea that the relationship between evidence and the confirmation of a hypothesis is not a logically deductive one, making confirmation impossible. Popper takes Hume’s idea one step further and claims that science does make epistemic progress, not through confirmation, but through falsification. If we want to confirm the hypothesis that all ravens are black, we can go observe black ravens, but the spotting of one black raven or even hundreds of black ravens still cannot confirm our hypothesis because seeing many black ravens does not logically entail that all ravens are black, and there always remains the possibility that we have failed to see a white raven that exists somewhere else. Besides, it is possible to come up with an infinite number of claims based on a finite set of data. By seeing a number of black ravens, we can theorize infinite general theories that should not be taken seriously, like how all black ravens like people more, thus, are more likely to be seen than non-black ravens. Therefore, Popper would say that seeing black ravens does not confirm the hypothesis and should not affect our confidence in the hypothesis that all ravens are black at all.
Even though the relationship between evidence and confirmation is not a logically deductive one, the relationship between evidence and falsification is a logically deductive one because seeing a white raven indeed falsifies the hypothesis that all ravens are black by pure logic. We cannot know if a hypothesis is true, but we can know when it is false. Popper thinks that the nature of scientific progress is the accumulation of a large pile of hypotheses known to be false. Therefore, Popper believes that science only progresses by falsification.

Popper does later on take a step back and propose the concept of corroboration – a theory is said to be well corroborated if it survives well-designed experiments specially designed to falsify it. If we want to corroborate the hypothesis that all ravens are black, we will design experiments that specifically look for non-black ravens. If we still do not find a raven that is not black, the hypothesis is well corroborated, according to Popper. It is unclear what Popper exactly means by corroboration because even though he denies it, the idea of corroboration is similar to confirmation, both of which rationally raise one’s confidence in a hypothesis.

Popper proposes his idea of how scientists should be doing science with an emotional component. With unparalleled intellectual honesty, Popper believes that while other epistemic works, such as philosophy and theology, aim to show their cherished beliefs to be true, science has the epistemic privilege of rigorous falsification. Popper sees scientists in a romanticized way: they’re like heroes who are willing to risk their lives in the jungles just so they can observe an eclipse that might potentially falsify Einstein’s theory. To him, science possesses Nietzsche’s ascetic and perverse ideals and can progress only through logical deduction applied in the falsification of scientific hypotheses based on evidence.

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