RE: falsifying the idea of falsification
March 28, 2020 at 7:34 am
(This post was last modified: March 28, 2020 at 7:36 am by Belacqua.)
(March 28, 2020 at 5:33 am)downbeatplumb Wrote: Well there was supposed to be a crash and physical evidence left behind that was covered up by the "man".
If the evidence for the crash turns out to be wrong and the physical evidence proves to be something else then it would be falsifiable.
Enough unfettered research could falsify the claim is what I'm saying.
I think the article I quoted was using "falsifiable" in a different way. (Which I take to be the standard way that scientists use it.) The article was saying that there needs to be one question which, if answered in a certain way, would show the theory to be false.
In the Roswell case, people could accumulate a mountain of evidence but none of it would definitively show that the theory was false. For example, evidence that there was a crash of a secret military vehicle (from Earth) would merely show that there was such a crash, not that there was never an alien.
I agree with you that among reasonable people, mountains of evidence should eventually lead to a fairly certain conclusion. But I think that's different from what we mean when we talk about falsification.
Quote:Each claim has to be taken on its own merits and investigated if one had sufficient evidence then it would be taken seriously.
That's certainly true. And that's why patient accumulation of evidence is the best way. To falsify a claim would require only one piece of reliable evidence that showed the claim was false. The usual "Precambrian rabbit" example.
Quote:Arguments are not evidence.
"Evidence," to me, is anything that increases the believability of a proposition. So if there are lots of very good arguments for something, I would say that the believability is increased.
Maybe you're using "evidence" to mean empirical evidence of the kind that science uses. The philosophy of science explains pretty clearly why science restricts itself to that kind of evidence, and why it's right to do so. But that doesn't mean that logical arguments are incapable of being persuasive in non-scientific subjects.
