It is generally agreed these days that a theory is unscientific if there is no conceivable way of testing the predictions of the theory, i.e. a scientific theory should be testable. What is not clear however is what it means for a theory to be testable. Two opposing notions of testability have been suggested. According to the first notion, a theory is scientific if it can, in principle, be empirically verified. In this view, scientific theories make such predictions that are possible to compare with the results of experiments or observations. According to the second notion, a theory is scientific if it can, in principle, be falsified by experiments and observations. The champions of this view hold that a capacity of being empirically confirmed is not a great virtue, as many theories – including many unscientific theories – have that capacity. Consider, for instance, astrology that can easily claim to have had many confirming instances, such as many Cancers who were great teachers, or many Aries who were great leaders, and yet it is clearly an unscientific theory. Thus, in this view, what matters is a theory’s capacity to be disconfirmed by experiments and observations, i.e. to formulate its predictions in such a way that they can, at least in principle, be empirically disconfirmed. It is this feature that unscientific theories lack. For example, no matter how many Cancer that cannot teach or Aries that cannot lead we manage to observe, that will not disconfirm the claims of astrology. One possible objection to this second notion of testability comes from the idea of theory-ladenness. It can be argued that no empirical theory can ever be decisively disconfirmed, since each empirical test necessarily presupposes the acceptance of a number of theories that make the test possible.
Answer the three question?
A. What is the main question (problem) at issue in this passage? Formulate it as a question sentence.
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