From FIROZ MOHAMED
E. Paull’s fears about the implications for epistemology of falsifying
Popper’s principle are groundless because Popper has never claimed to provide
a hypothesis which helps to distinguish between sense and nonsense (Letters,
18 August). His criterion of falsifiability, which states that a hypothesis
is scientific if it is falsifiable, unscientific of it is not, merely draws
an essentially arbitrary but very useful line of demarcation between science
and non-science. Popper’s principle is thus a definition of science, not
a hypothesis about it. Therefore, it is invalid to subject it to the criterion
of falsifiability, which only applies to hypotheses.
Firoz Mohamed Glossop, Derbyshire
