popper-logic-scientific-discovery

APPENDIX *viii
Content, Simplicity, and Dimension
As indicated earlier, 1 I do not believe in hampering scientific language
by preventing the scientist from using freely, whenever it is convenient,
new ideas, predicates, ‘occult’ concepts, or anything else. For this
reason, I cannot support the various recent attempts to introduce into
the philosophy of science the method of artificial calculi or ‘language
systems’—systems supposed to be models of a simplified ‘language of
science’. I believe that these attempts have not only been useless so far,
but that they have even contributed to the obscurity and confusion
prevalent in the philosophy of science.
It has been briefly explained in section 38 and in appendix i that,
had we (absolutely) atomic statements at our disposal—or what
amounts to the same, (absolutely) atomic predicates—then we might
introduce, as a measure of the content of a theory, the reciprocal of the
minimum number of atomic statements needed for refuting that theory.
For since the degree of content of a theory is the same as its degree of
testability or refutability, the theory which is refutable by fewer atomic
statements would also be the one which is the more easily refutable or
testable, and thus the one with the greater content. (In brief, the
1 See section 38, especially the text after note 2 and my appendix i; also my second
Preface, 1958.