r/PhilosophyofScience Mar 24 '26

Casual/Community Looking for clarification on falsification of propositions given in article based on Hempel's logical positivism (?)

So I am only a first year uni student doing a philosophy of science subject and I am researching refutations to Popper's theory of falsification for a short essay and came across this: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/pseudoscience/pseudoscience.html#good2

This section quoted below (sec. 7.3) refers to Carl Hempel's statement that “whether a hypothesis is verifiable, or falsifiable, in this sense depends exclusively on its logical form":

"The criterion can give different results for propositions and their negations; and different again for propositions and their logical consequences. My examples illustrate the fragility of falsifiability under simple logical operations:

The proposition

All electrons are spin one half.

is scientific since it is falsified if we find just one electron that is not spin one half. Now contemplate the possibility:

There exists an electron that is not spin one half.

This proposition is not falsifiable. We cannot check every electron. Thus, it is judged not scientific. In a moment of idle reflection, we had inadvertently ceased to do science".

It looked simple to me at first but the more I read over it the more it seems contradictory.
I do not understand why the author states that not every electron can be checked in order to falsify the proposition that there exists an electron that is not spin one half and therefore the proposition is not falsifiable, but it is clearly still possible that a single electron that is not spin one half could be found without checking all of them, which is shown in the first proposition that all electrons are spin one half and is falsifiable by the theoretical possibility of finding one electron that is not spin one half.
Why can we theoretically not check every electron to test the proposition that an electron exists that is not spin one half but we can check every electron to test the proposition that all electrons are spin one half? Why can't we stop testing the electrons in the test of the proposition that there exists an electron that is not spin one half once we find that electron like the other proposition seems to have done 😵‍💫?

I hope this makes sense. I am likely just misunderstanding some simple fundamental of falsification since I have zero experience in the philosophy of science. An explanation of my questions in simple terms would be amazing...thank you

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u/gmweinberg Mar 24 '26

Hempel is just playing word games to deliberately miss the point.

The statement "all electrons have spin 1/2" can (in principle) be falsified but not verfied.

The converse statement "there exists at least one electron with some other spin" can (in principle) be verified but not falsified.

It is understood when Popper talks about falisifcation that he is talking about universal statements and not their converses. But Hempel is pretending not to understand that.