David Deutsch wrote:
He chose ‘two years’ because it survived this criticism best of all the propositions he chose.
What does this mean? How can a theory partially survive criticism?
-
-
"One of the main tasks for human reason is to make the universe we live in understandable to ourselves. This is the task of science. There are two different components of about equal importance in this enterprise. The first is poetic inventiveness ..."
– Karl Popper
books
(non-commercial links)
Presumably it means something like: there may be other statements we could make that would be more specific and interesting, but we haven’t made them yet.
Isn’t that a description of “not the final truth”?
*Best* survives criticism is a comparison to other theories that also survived criticism, but somehow not as well.
If a theory is criticized and partially survives, does the criticism also partially survive? Can both a theory and criticism of the theory partially survive? Does one partially survive in inverse proportion to the other?