Examples Of Corrobortion

Karl Popper believed that a theory could not be confirmed by the empirical method but it could be corroborated. Corroboration was used by Popper for something that a scientific theory acquires when it survives attempts to refute it. Peter Godfrey Smith gives an analogy of how corroboration can be understood with the example of the academic transcript and a letter of recommendation. The transcript is like corroboration because it says what the student has done and measure your past performance but it does not say about what you will do in the future. Popper believed that no good reasons could be given for believing that past results is reliable for the future. The letter of recommendation is like confirmation because it says something about …show more content…
He also was aware of that there was some sort of confirmation bias. Which we are subject to fixate on and emphasize data that confirms one’s prior beliefs while ignoring or dismissing counter-evidence. Also the more easily a theory can be confirmed, the more trivial and less scientific the theory is. An example he uses is Freudanism. When a parent strikes the child in anger confirms the Freudian’s belief in an id, while the parent who refrains from striking in anger instead confirms the Freudian’s belief in a counter-acting super-ego. The Freudian sees confirmation everywhere but this isn 't reason to think observation supports the theory. Instead, it’s reason to think the theory rules out nothing. More examples of not good scientific theories are astrology and Marxism because they rule out nothing or very little. Karl Popper is listed as an inductive skeptic because of this. But his answer to all of this would be falsificationism. Falsificationism is when a hypothesis is scientific if and only if it has the potential to be refuted by some possible observation. Also that a hypothesis is bold to the extent that it risks falsification and we do make scientific progress, but not by confirming the hypotheses. Then we aggressively attempt to refute our hypotheses and we learn as time goes on, what is really false. There are some objections and criticism of this view that Karl Popper has of corroboration. Popper appears to rely more on method than on the pure logic of something. An example is that falsificationism cannot recognize nontrivial probability attributions as scientific. For instance if the event of something has a probability of .001 then this event would have no falsifier. Another example would be if you have a coin that if fair, then the probability of heads 100 times in a row is extremely low. This is