RE: Question about "faith"
September 25, 2020 at 10:23 am
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2020 at 11:03 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(September 25, 2020 at 9:09 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: A hypothesis is not mere conjecture, it is a proposed explanation for available evidence, and that explanation has to be falsifiable. Guess what ghosts aren't.
No, that is what theories are, they explain the available evidence. Hypothesis are predictions about the outcome of an experiment. Conjecture aligns more with the nature of theories.
(September 25, 2020 at 4:44 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: You could start from zero and "prove your way up". Sounds like an issue of competence, not possibility, to me.
"The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity [...] But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd." -Karl Popper.
Starting from zero and proving your way up is perhaps possible under some other method, just not the scientific one.
(September 25, 2020 at 10:09 am)possibletarian Wrote: Otherwise what's to stop people proposing any unfalsifiable proposition ?
People are stopped from doing so precisely because your conjecture must be refutable if it is to be scientific.