Quotes About Disconfirmation

if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system."18

Although there is a limit beyond which belief will not withstand disconfirmation, it is clear that the introduction of contrary evidence can serve to increase the conviction and enthusiasm of the believer.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

The more you invest in a set of beliefs - the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction - the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down. As Festinger recalled in an oral history, One of the things we expected would happen would be that, after the disconfirmation of this prediction...they would...have to discard their belief, but to the extent that they were committed to it, this would be difficult to do.

But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity.

If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.28 Peirce, all those years ago, got it right.

Psychologists have done tests about how humans approach problem solving and found that we are somehow preprogrammed to look for confirmation and not for disconfirmation.

Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just "more robust.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.