Abstract
There has been little research into the weak kindsof negating hypotheses. Hypotheses may be unfalsifiable. In this case it is impossible tofind a contradiction in some area of the conceptualsystems in which they are incorporated.Notwithstanding this fact, it is sometimes necessaryto construct ways of rejecting the unfalsifiablehypothesis at hand by resorting to some external forms of negation, external because wewant to avoid any arbitrary and subjectiveelimination, which would be rationally orepistemologically unjustified. I will consider akind of ``weak'' (unfalsifiable) hypotheses that arehard to negate and the ways for making it easy. Inthese cases the subject can ``rationally'' decide towithdraw his hypotheses even in contexts where it is``impossible'' to find ``explicit'' contradictions: theuse of negation as failure (an interestingtechnique for negating hypotheses and accessing newones suggested by artificial intelligence) isilluminating. I plan to explore whether this kind ofnegation can be employed to model hypothesiswithdrawal in Poincaré's conventionalism of theprinciples of physics and in Freudian analyticreasoning.
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Magnani, L. Withdrawing Unfalsifiable Hypotheses. Foundations of Science 4, 133–153 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009667028023
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009667028023