Topic summary
Falsified
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Falsifiability.
Dogmatic falsificationism
A dogmatic falsificationist ignores the role of auxiliary hypotheses. The assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses of a particular test are all the hypotheses that must be correct in order for the test to perform as expected. The predicted observation that is contradicted depends on the theory and these auxiliary hypotheses. Therefore, whether it is the theory or an auxiliary hypothesis that is falsified by the observation is undetermined. Lakatos gives the example of the path of a planet. If the path contradicts Newton's law, it is not clear what should be rejected: Newton's law or the hypothesis that no other body influenced the path. A dogmatic falsificationist would ignore that and consider that Newton's law is falsified.