Criticisms Of Flew’s Falsification Principle Flashcards
What is the concept of falsification according to Popper and Flew?
for something to be meaningful, there had to be some evidence which could empirically refute the statement.
What did Popper maintain about scientific statements?
Popper maintained that “there can be no statements in science which cannot be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.” Whilst verification and falsification seemed a sensible means of testing the meaningfulness of language, they are not without limitations.
What was R.M. Hare’s criticism of Flew’s falsification principle?
R.M. Hare criticised Flew’s falsification principle, suggesting that the concept of meaningfulness came from the impact that a belief had on an individual, not from the empirically verifiable nor falsifiable nature of the belief.
What are ‘bliks’ according to Hare?
Hare argued that religious statements are meaningful and the falsification principle cannot be used as they are non-cognitive: it can only be used on cognitive statements which make factual claims. He proposed the idea of ‘bliks’; a term coined to describe a way of looking at our experiences. Hare suggested a blik had the power to radically affect our behaviour and relationship with the people around us. In this sense, blik was meaningful even if it cannot be verified.
What parable did Hare use to illustrate his point about bliks?
To illustrate this, Hare tells the parable of university dons and a paranoid student who believes the dons are dedicated to causing him harm: “A certain lunatic is convinced that all dons want to murder him […] there is no behaviour of dons that can be enacted which he will accept as counting against his theory.”
What was Flew’s argument regarding believers’ statements about God?
Flew argues that, in the same way, if a believer’s statement about God can be made to fit into any circumstance, it is not meaningful and has no empirical implications. Hare argued such statements are ‘bliks; ‘modes of cognition’ which have significant importance and there are “ways of regarding the world which are in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable.”
What did Mitchell suggest about religious believers’ perspectives?
Mitchell suggested to Flew that he had fundamentally misunderstood the religious believer’s perspective when stating that they allow nothing to count against their beliefs: he argued this simply was not true. Religious believers are frequently faced with challenges to their belief and evidence that seems contrary: it was a matter of faith as to how the individual dealt with those challenges.
What parable did Mitchell use to illustrate his point?
Mitchell uses the parable of ‘The Partisan and the Stranger’ to illustrate his point. A stranger meets a resistance worker, who is on his side. He asks the stranger to trust him even though he might see him doing things that appear to be going against the cause they are both working for. He therefore claimed that Flew missed the point that like the resistance worker, believers have a commitment to trust God based on faith. He proposed that belief in God is “a significant article of faith.” Mitchell’s point is that religious belief is based upon facts, but that belief cannot be verified/falsified.
What did Swinburne note about human language and meaningfulness?
Swinburne also noted that there were plenty of instances where human language was used in ways that were accepted as meaningful by people, even without empirical supporting evidence. Just because an idea cannot be falsified does not mean it should be automatically discounted as being meaningless.
What example did Swinburne give to illustrate meaningfulness without evidence?
Swinburne gives the example of ‘toys in the cupboard’ coming to life: even though there is no evidence to support or deny this assertion, the idea is meaningful to those who propose it. “The trouble is, however, that there are plenty of examples of statements which some people judge to be factual which are not apparently confirmable or disconfirmable through observation.” Although one cannot prove or falsify that the toys do not leave the cupboard when unsupervised, the concept of their movement still has enough meaning because we can understand it.
