Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Falsificationism remains a popular framework considered by many scientists as 'the normatively correct model of science', and of human cognition as a kind of 'lay science'. In this paper, we demonstrate some fundamental conceptual shortcomings and gaps in this normative prescription. While some of the issues presented here connect to well-known arguments from the philosophy of science, we connect these issues to the topic of efficient information search. Specifically, we show that a strict falsificationist rejection of the idea of 'confirmation' of scientific hypothesis (more specifically, entertaining and updating beliefs in those hypotheses, based on evidence) makes scientific research and information search overall less efficient, compared to an accuracy-based Bayesian approach.