Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Refutation
Axis: Scientific method — How does science go about justifying its claims?
A theory is never proven, only refuted. A hypothesis is scientific if it exposes itself to an experiment that could disprove it; as long as it withstands them, it is corroborated, never established once and for all.
By what method am I holding this belief?RuleAttested · Peirce
Ask not whether your belief is true, but by which method you hold it.
In "The Fixation of Belief", distinguishes four ways of settling doubt: tenacity (I cling to what I already believe), authority (I believe it because I was told to), the a priori method (I believe it because it seems agreeable to reason, to my taste), and the method of science (I believe it because it answers to public facts that could correct it). This rule does not hand you instant certainty: it makes you notice how you actually hold a belief, and invites you to move it toward the last method, the only one that answers to communal checking and stays open to revision.
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- Descriptive Thought experimentThe black swan
No number of white swans proves that all are white, but a single black swan is enough to belie it: how, then, does one establish a general law, by piling up cases, by hunting the counter-example, or by weighing the probabilities?
a universal law - DescriptiveWhat can evidence do?
No accumulation of evidence proves a universal law; a single counter-example, on the other hand, seems enough to refute it: evidence would then count only by its power to belie, never to establish. But does it even truly refute? When a result contradicts a theory, it is never that theory alone that is at stake, but a whole bundle of auxiliary hypotheses, and one can always sacrifice one of them to save it. Prove, refute, or only make more or less probable: what, exactly, can evidence do?
a piece of evidence, a test - DescriptiveIs there a method at all?
What if there were no universal rule of sound scientific reasoning? Feyerabend argues that the great discoveries often broke the canons of method, and that in science "anything goes": the logic reconstructed after the fact is not what actually advances knowledge.
the methodological rule itself