While testing a hypothesis one is likely to commit two type errors?
Answers
Karl Popper is probably the most influential philosopher of science in the 20thcentury (Wulff et al., 1986). Many scientists, even those who do not usually read books on philosophy, are acquainted with the basic principles of his views on science. The popularity of Popper’s philosophy is due partly to the fact that it has been well explained in simple terms by, among others, the Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar (Medawar, 1969). Popper makes the very important point that empirical scientists (those who stress on observations only as the starting point of research) put the cart in front of the horse when they claim that science proceeds from observation to theory, since there is no such thing as a pure observation which does not depend on theory. Popper states, “… the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd: As may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his ‘priceless’ collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as inductive (empirical) evidence.