Post-Positivism

Popper takes it a couple steps farther. He pushes positivism to say that we can’t really know what we can prove. We can’t even know what we have proven in the past. All we can know is what is not true. Then, returning to the junior high science classroom, we can’t know that light is requisite for plants to grow, we simply know that the little bean we planted in the paper cup filled with potting soil won’t grow in the dark. What Popper strives for is to try to prove science wrong, and with each unsuccessful attempt to prove something wrong, all we know is that it is more not wrong.
This seems a lot easier to me that to prove something right. The ‘march of science’ then would be so much slower-going. Let’s say we want to prove a soldier is dead on the battle field, and that soldier is nowhere to be found. We cannot say that just because we don’t see him means that he is dead. So let’s look through a pile of dog tags that are collected from dead soldiers. If his own tags are not in there, all we know is that no one put them in the pile. Still do not know whether he is dead. If they are in there, we cannot say that he is dead. All we can prove is the presence of his dog tags. Dead does not mean that someone other than the owner of the tags is in possession of them. So, to falsify the claim of a dead soldier would mean that we would need to have a live soldier. Of course, dead is dead and live is live, and not even Sir Karl Popper can debate that. So maybe my example is not ‘scientific’ enough. But it still addresses the issue of what the posited evidence actually proves.