I've always thought that Dawkins and Harris (Sam, not Kamala), and especially Krauss (though I always found Dennett fairly reasonable), perfectly illustrate Heidegger's curious claim that "Scientists do not think". He wasn't being cheeky there, really he was just saying that science does not concern itself with thinking, and he was speaking more to instrumental science (or techne). They're outright dismissive of philosophy generally, outside of perhaps Kuhn and Popper, and, weirdly, seem oblivious to philosophy of language. If they do consider philosophy of language, they do so only within very narrow confines. (They do sometimes explore philosophy of mind, to a degree, but it's always in a very instrumental or technical manner.)
And they invariably
misunderstand Popper and his version of
The Scientific Method. They pick out the heroic bit about scientific theories laying their necks on the chopping block, as it were, virtually courting refutation (complete nonsense, of course) while neglecting or misunderstanding what Popper says about evidence/confirmation.
If you're a strict Popperian, induction plays no role in science,
none at all. That means you can forget all about theories being highly confirmed, moderately confirmed, or even a teeny-weeny-itsy-bitsy-polka-dot-bikini confirmed. Scientific theories are not supported by evidence
at all. Put another way, there is
never any good reason to
believe that a scientific theory is
true.
Mountains of evidence for evolution? Forget it! There is not even a molehill.
Any strict Popperians left out there?
Now, the danger is that if you pick and choose from one philosophy and another -- taking the bits you like from Popper and elsewhere -- you end up with an
incoherent whole.
The voluminous Wiki page on
The Scientific Method presents a case in point. Unsuspecting readers may labor under the misapprehension that what they are reading is a highly detailed account of a singular, unitary, coherent
Method.
Think again! What you're reading is bits and pieces -- taken from here, there, and everywhere, often mutually incompatible -- constituting something of a Frankenstein method.