Free will and the necessary evil

[Jehanne]

No, what I claimed is that philosophers "do not have a laboratory" in which they can test their ideas.  Scientists, in general, and, physicists, in particular, do have laboratories in which various propositions may be testable, and, either, provisionally verified, or falsified outright.

Now you're just lying.

Metaphysical ideas are not testable ... and no mechanisms exist to adjudicate the disagreements amongst them.

Well, again it's definitions, and, you, apparently, do not agree with the linguists at Merriam-Webster who, in your view, may also be in the "dumb as coal category". If you grant the definition of metaphysics as being "beyond physics", then, yes, such ideas are not testable. It was, after all, Auguste Comte, a prominent French philosopher, who stated that humanity would never be able to understand the chemical composition of stars, an idea that was disproven a few decades later by the physicist Jean Foucault.

And, so, philosophers can and do make mistakes.