Falsification and Marxism
Philosophy of Science aims to describe the foundations and approaches to science. Great thinkers have always been contested or proved that there are theories for that as well. Falsification is a concept invented by Karl Popper which holds that a scientific hypothesis cannot be true but can 'pass' tests. By creating the framework of Falsification, Popper tried to distinguish between real science, real scientific approaches and pseudoscience and virtue and morals disguised as real scholarship. In this essay, Popper's falsification theory will be explained and related to two components of the school of International Studies. One being Marxism, since Marxist theory is presently still contested for not being truly scientific. The other one being the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis which has already been falsified, yet today's linguists are still studying it. Furthermore, it will examine how falsification is used in regards of history and linguistics.
Ruthlessly applied, Falsification entails that anything that cannot be falsified is not science, meaning that if a theory applied while experimenting excludes the possibility of a false outcome it is not scientific enough. Given this condition, Karl Popper aimed…show more content… Popper claims that any theory or hypothesis should have a surface for falsification, a criteria which if proven negative the theory can fail, otherwise it is not scientific enough (Burawoy 776). Popper himself gives us the example of Marxism, he argues that the problem with Marxist theory is that it seems to have a greater explanatory power; it justifies nearly everything in the field of history which it operates in (Popper 17). Many other scholars agree that Marxism should not necessarily be considered scientific because for his theory Marx substituted moral passion for scientific reason (Burawoy