ABSTRACT
Science began in Antiquity as a branch of wisdom, and philosophy was distinguished from wisdom only by philosophers. The practice of public relations evolved unawares and uncontrolled as a part of the advertising world of the free market, where the shortest of the short-term interests govern, so that the most cynical opportunists set the tone. There are two schools of thought in the establishment of the philosophy of science, inductivists and instrumentalists, so-called. Popper's critique of the instantiation theory of induction is simple: there are practices accepted in the scientific community concerning what counts there as confirmation, and these should be taken into account when a theory of confirmation is presented: not all instances confirm theories but, at most, those which were expected to refute it and failed. The more extensive criticism of Popper is directed against the identification of confirmation with some function abiding by the calculus of probability.
