Dec 11, 2019, 9:58 AM

As far as I know (and this is my area of specialization), western success in science, technology, medicine, and economics was due to the transfer of our legal tradition (by Aristotle to Bacon to Hume to Hayek), and the failure of our philosophers to understand that transfer.

So, the demarcation in law between testifiability and fiction, is legal due diligence (falsification). Man can perform due diligence against every dimension perceivable by man: categorical consistency (identity), internal consistency (logical), operational consistency (existential possibility), external consistency (empirical), rational consistency (rational choice), reciprocal consistency (rational choice between parties in cooperation), completeness (full accounting within stated limits), warrantied by possibility of restitution.

In other words, the demarcation between science and non-science is falsificationary, and not only the test of falsifiability, but due diligence against falsehood in all dimensions perceivable by man.

And this brings us to where else Popper failed: cost. Philosophers generally work in sets, and the law, engineering in operations, and while sets are largely verbal constructs free of cost, action, operations, engineering, science, law and economics include costs. This is why there is a high correlation between moralizing and philosophy, and a high correlation between science and law. Because moralizing does seeks general rules regardless of cost, and sciences and law seek general rules including costs.

Why does this matter? Popper never performed a study of scientific research, he just used reason to state that choices in scientific investigation was undecidable. But it’s demonstrably false. the problem in scientific exploration like any form of action (engineering), is that as distance from human scale increases either smaller or larger, the costs of investigation increases, and as such we pursue the information we can afford to. And this turns out to be the optimum means of investigation. And this corresponds to the physical and human world’s behavior: nature must take the least cost action possible, and humans do as well – as long as we make a full accounting of causes (incentives).

Cheers