CP Reflection Sheet -2

PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MANAGEMENT

By
Puneet Kumar – PGPGC202100279

Professor:
Mr. Ajay Pandey & Mr. Sebastian Morris

Academic Associate:
Mr. Ahmed Ashhar

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

August 10, 2022
Karl Popper’s Ideas
(I will be focusing on only the falsification aspect of Popper’s idea and take a short example to elaborate the same)

Let's say a Class 10th student is doing a lab experiment where the liquid in a test tube is supposed to turn blue. Instead,
the liquid turns green, and the student, using Popper's logic, says that this proves that the current theory of chemistry is
wrong. That is clearly not good science, because the conclusion is drawn way too quickly. The most likely reason is
that the person who did the experiment did something wrong. It can be fairly said that it is true for everybody, & not
just novices. Scientists at CERN failed to find the Higgs boson after turning the Large Hadron Collider on for the first
time at full power. If they had listened to Popper, they would have decided that the standard model of quantum
mechanics was wrong and stopped looking. Again, that would have happened way too quickly. Instead, they decided
to keep looking until they couldn't blame their methods or tools for the search's failure, and their hard work paid off in
a big way in the end.
Conclusion
Popper's main problem is that his method of falsificationism, which is based on deduction, can never prove that a
theory is wrong. There is always the chance that the theory is right and that the bad result was caused by something
else in the experiment. We can say that he might have been right to say that scientific theories should be tested in
ways that could be dangerous, but again he went too far when he said that science is a clear-cut process of elimination.