Propensity-Based Epistemology

Scope & Motivation

While I find Popper's falsifiability as the demarcation criterion between scientific theories and pseudo-science to be quite refreshing and one of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, I can't help but think it's lacking and too loose, it's not tight enough to dismiss lots of nonsense. For example, a theory claiming that eating a thousand kilograms of grass can cure cancer is not pseudo-scientific according to that criterion, after all, you can definitely test and falsify this theory. But should we?

I'm not talking here about the morality of the tests, but about its worthiness. If you ask anyone whether a layman or someone with advanced degree in pharmacology, they'd probably say it's nonsense, but how do they know? Nobody has tested that!

We have an intuition to dismiss such theories without having to test them, and that's what I'm trying to understand and formalize, to incorporate into a finer demarcation criterion.

Current Direction

I am a subscriber of the objective interpretation of probability, and I believe this intuition stems from our minds approximating the propensity (inherent probability) of certain objects to have certain qualities.

I'm still the early literature review and exploration phase so far, currently focusing on:

• Finding and reviewing literature regarding the various objective interpretations of probability (following the work of Donald Gillies)
• Exploring literature about the different interpretations of causality