Falsification as the royal road to truth was debunked some time ago, and isn't taken very seriously in contemporary philosophy of science. Partly, because Popperian falsification only gets you so far when you look at the actual history of science.
That is, when you look seriously at what scientists do as opposed to what they say they do when they attempt to justify their work, you will find they are not falsifiers but model-builders. If you like to learn more about how Popper has fared in the philosophy of science, you might find Thomas Kuhn [0] and Paul Feyerabend [1],[2] interesting counterpoints, I would throw in the work of Larry Laudan too as it is a good overview of "realist" attempts to move beyond falsification while trying to avoid Feyerabend's embrace of "relativism." [3],[4]
Obviously alot of more recent and good literature on the subject!
[0]: Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962
[1]: 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
[2]: 1978. Science in a Free Society
[3]: 1977. Progress and its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth
[4]: 1996. Beyond Positivism and Relativism
After looking into this a bit, I can say that I don't subscribe to positivism or relativism, even if they are trendy in philosophy class these days. Both seem to reject realism and promote groupthink.
"Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?" (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 171)
I have not been publishing in many years so my reading appetite has diminished, but I think the trendy -ism in philosophy of science is not so much relativism but pluralism.
Regarding your quotation, Feyerabend explicitly rejects that science is successful and in fact has been actually harmful in understanding in the case of biology. And he argued cogently that "science" should be seperated from the state with as much rigor as "religion" is. He was one of the greatest anarchist minds I ever had the pleasure of meeting.
Nancy Cartwright makes a similar argument but keeping a realist stance about how science doesn't really make progress describing the fundamental truths about the world. That is, people usually hold up the wonders of the modern world as evidence that science progresses towards universal knowledge, e.g., jets fly! But she would say I think that jet engines do not depend at all on scientific understanding of turbulence, which tend to be completely wrong in the material world, and require all kinds of simplifications and specializations in order to make this concrete jet engine work. [0]
That is, when you look seriously at what scientists do as opposed to what they say they do when they attempt to justify their work, you will find they are not falsifiers but model-builders. If you like to learn more about how Popper has fared in the philosophy of science, you might find Thomas Kuhn [0] and Paul Feyerabend [1],[2] interesting counterpoints, I would throw in the work of Larry Laudan too as it is a good overview of "realist" attempts to move beyond falsification while trying to avoid Feyerabend's embrace of "relativism." [3],[4]
Obviously alot of more recent and good literature on the subject!
[0]: Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 [1]: 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge [2]: 1978. Science in a Free Society [3]: 1977. Progress and its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth [4]: 1996. Beyond Positivism and Relativism