(May 9, 2025 at 9:52 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: And when we observe that the grass is dry, what does that tell us about the proposition that it rained?
That it's disconfirmed. Modus Tollens: Standard hypothesis testing.
(However, it does fall prey to the problem of auxillary hypothesis. Which is to say that any theory or proposition is composed of many, seen and unseen, auxillary hypothesis. And when observation appears to refute a theory, we don't actually know what is being disconfirmed. For example, in this scenario there is an auxiliary hypothesis that rain always falls uninterrupted. And perhaps a tarp interrupted the rainfall, disconfirming the auxiliary hypothesis, but not the main hypothesis.)
