Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 29,144
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Benjamin Rush fell into a fatal trap when assessing the outcome of his treatment. His method of evaluating the evidence made it impossible to conclude that his treatment did not work. If the recovery of a patient meant confirmation of his treatment (and, hence, his theory of medicine), then it only seems fair that the death of a patient should have meant disconfirma- tion. Instead, he rationalized away these disconfirmations. By interpreting the evidence as he did, Rush violated one of the most important rules regarding the construction and testing of theories in science: He made it impossible to falsify his theory.
Scientific theories must always be stated in such a way that the predictions derived from them could potentially be shown to be false. Thus, the methods of evaluating new evidence relevant to a particular theory must always include the possibility that the data will falsify the theory. This principle is often termed the falsifiability criterion, and its importance in scientific progress has been most forcefully articulated by Karl Popper, a philosopher of science whose writings are read widely by working scientists.
The falsifiability criterion states that, for a theory to be useful, the pre-dictions drawn from it must be specific. The theory must go out on a limb, so to speak, because in telling us what should happen, the theory must also imply that certain things will not happen. If these latter things do happen, then we have a clear signal that something is wrong with the theory: It may need to be modified, or we may need to look for an entirely new theory. Either way, we shall end up with a theory that is nearer to the truth. By contrast, if a theory does not rule out any possible observations, then the theory can never be changed, and we are frozen into our current way of thinking, with no possibility of progress. Thus, a successful theory is not one that accounts for every possible outcome because such a theory robs itself of any predictive power.
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 This was a nice chapter to read a while back
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