(September 24, 2020 at 9:13 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 24, 2020 at 9:09 pm)Sal Wrote: Clarify. How do we do science then?
Falsification.
Sure, but scientists don't write up 1000 stupid hypotheses and then go about attempting to falsify them. They stand on the work that is already done. There may be a lot of crap in that current model, but the scientist uses the current model to create a hypothesis and then tests it. When something fails, they go back and look at whether the model is wrong.
No models include ghosts as the cause of strange sounds.
Scientific method is about finding the most probable explanation, or at least the one that explains the most with the least arbitrary baggage. There are many tools in the toolkit, and one of those is to dismiss extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence. On the basis of probability, this is the correct behavior. However, once evidence is presented and is validated, the scientist has to re-evaluate the current models. Burden of proof is "a thing".
So yes, one needs a "reason" (extraordinary evidence) to start postulating ghosts as the reason for anything. They are a low probability hypothesis given the lack of a model to explain them and lack of evidence.
Just like any particular god.