Some notes on the Aristotelian origin of the distinction between a falsificationist's and verificationist's view of science: together with corrections to my earlier account

Abstract

It has not always been realised that Karl Popper's analytic distinction between the logically stronger falsificationist's view of science and the logically weaker verificationist's and inductivist's view of science is a modification of Aristotle's distnction between the notions 'all' and 'some'. This document traces this distinction anew in a way that corrects my earlier (Corkett, 1997) account in which a semantic rather than a logical view was taken of this distinction. For example: when writing the 1997 paperI was not aware that the universal law "All swans are white' represented a universal categorical proposition 'All S is P' where 'S' represented the subject 'swan' and the 'P' represented the predicate 'white'. In this document I try to cover some of the main points of my 1997 paper in a way that clarifies their origin in the Law of Tripartite Entailment, a logical rule unknown to me fifteen years ago.