Confirmable and influential Metaphysics
An article worth reading: Confirmable and influential metaphysics.
Watkins worked with Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend at the LSE. The article here is very much in the Popperian tradition, looking at the logical structure of unfalsifiable metaphysical propositions, but does not simply dismissing them as meaningless. Indeed, certain metaphysical propositions are
Examples given include determinism, historicism, mechanism (the denial of the existence of empty space), its opposite - field theories, vitalism and its denial, various aspects of mind, and conservation doctrines of all sorts.
I'll offer a synopsis.
Watkins worked with Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend at the LSE. The article here is very much in the Popperian tradition, looking at the logical structure of unfalsifiable metaphysical propositions, but does not simply dismissing them as meaningless. Indeed, certain metaphysical propositions are
Although haunted-universe doctrines are unempirical in the sense that they are compatible with every conceivable finite set of observation statements, they are not analytic or vacuous, but synthetic or factual, because there are empirical theories with which they will not be compatible
Examples given include determinism, historicism, mechanism (the denial of the existence of empty space), its opposite - field theories, vitalism and its denial, various aspects of mind, and conservation doctrines of all sorts.
I'll offer a synopsis.
Comments (133)
The difference between Level 1 and Level 3 is in the degree of verifiability. The car is in my garage today - take a look; but the metal that doesn't expand when heated - I don't have a sample as yet, but it's out there, somewhere... prove me wrong!
Uncircumscribed existential statements are the stuff of conspiracy theories. There's a flying saucer in a US military base. I know we've looked in all the military bases we know of, but this base is secret...
Anyhow, the key point here is that Level 2 statements are unfalsifiable, Level 3 statements are unverifiable, and their conjugate, Level 4 statements, are neither verifiable nor falsifiable.
Determinism: Every event has a cause. This has the form given for Level 4 statements, an existential statement nestled in a universal. Hence, if Watkins is correct, it can not be proved - doing so would require the impossibility that we examine every possible event and determine its cause; nor can it be falsified; that we have not so far found the cause of some given event does not imply that there is no such cause.
Yes. Most of those theories are meaningful, but non-empirical. That's why I say that Quantum Physics has inadvertently crossed the line into Meta-physics. Yet, by "meta-physics", I don't mean ghosts & gods, but merely those aspects of our world that are not directly accessible to the Scientific Method. That's why there is still some fertile territory for philosophical exploration.
Some of the pioneers of Quantum Physics saw its meta-physical implications, and used Eastern Philosophical terminology to express some counter-intuitive concepts. But they eventually lost-out to the hard empiricists, who rebuffed the "errant" theorists with "shut-up and calculate".
I have downloaded the PDF, and may have more to say later. That's because us meta-physical types often get booed off the stage in this forum, just because we go beyond the purview of empirical Physics. Apparently, some posters here have Physics Envy. :grin:
"Physics envy" refers to the envy (perceived or real) of scholars in other disciplines for the mathematical precision of fundamental concepts obtained by physicists. ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
This is how the problem of induction is resolved. It appears like an inductive conclusion cannot be proven. But an inductive truth is impossible to falsify, and if it is impossible to falsify it is necessarily true. Therefore demonstrating such an impossibility is what actually proves the truth of the inductive conclusion, thereby resolving the problem of induction.
Conservation of momentum, energy, information - all reduce to the form "For every local increase or decrease in x there exists a compensating increase or decrees elsewhere"...
Unprovable and unfalsifiable.
indirectly,
That is, physicalism is a metaphysical notion, by Watkin's standards.
... are easy to test and clearly not metaphysical. Never heard of conservation of information though.
According to some, universal empirical statements aren't verifiable but they're falsifiable. The classic example of "all swans are white" comes to mind. To verify it, we would have to observe all swans, something impossible because time is a factor - observing all swans over a hundred, or even a thousand generations will not suffice to prove "all swans are white" because that one non-white swan that breaks the pattern may just hatch from a perfectly good swan-egg just the next day after the triumphant but ill-considered decision to declare "all swans are white". However, we can falsify "all swans are white" with the observance of a single non-white swan.
Existential statements aren't falsifiable because to falsify, say, "some swans are white", we'd have to demonstrate the truth of, verify, the universal empirical statement "all swans are non-white" and verifying universal empirical statements is impossible for the reason mentioned in the preceding paragraph (time). Nevertheless, existential statements can be verified - observing one white swan would do the trick.
As you can see, given that we're, or rather scientists are, on the lookout for universal empirical statements that we can add to the theory/theories that explains our universe, we don't have the option of verifying them for that's impossible and so we're left with nothing else but falsficationism and this, according to Karl Popper, is [real] science.
What's intriguing is Karl Popper's idea that science is about falsifiability isn't a conscious choice on our part. It's not that we, sat down together somewhere, and after a good, long and serious discussion, decided to define science in terms of falsifiability. Given that science is about universal statements (the laws of nature), falsificationism is unavoidable, it's inevitable. That said, due credit must be given to Karl Popper for discovering this truth about science.
Note one important fact. Science is, first and foremost, empirical i.e. observation is a central feature of science. This is because verification but more importantly falsfication depends on observation. When (an) observation(s) is inconsistent with a scientific theory, that theory is falsified.
At this point it becomes clear that if a theory is non-scientific then it doesn't, in any way, involve observation, the very basis of falsification. Does this description of the non-scientific fit metaphysics and what it deals with? :chin:
As for this:
Whatever the scientific verdict on metaphysics is, it bears mentioning that falsficationism as a scientific principle is itself not without fault for it commits the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy; after all, it assumes a [scientific] theory to be true based on it not being falsified. The fallacious reasoning here is akin to, to use an example from metaphysics, believing that God exists just because it hasn't be proven false that God exists. Is the pot calling the kettle black? :chin: It's obvious that falsificationism is itself a deeply flawed perspective.
To sum it all up, neither metaphysical claims nor scientific claims are verifiable and even given that metaphysics is largely unfalsifiable, science is entirely, if falsificationism is its foundational premise, an argumentum ad ignorantiam.
As I explained, these two are contradictory. Unfalsifiable means impossible to falsify, which implies necessarily true, therefore proven.
Worthy read, yes, so.....thanks for it. I particularly favor Part III onward, myself.
But I have to ask....what does the paper say to you? You are historically an analytic-type, the premier tenet of which, is the notion that metaphysical propositions are not so much true or false, but generally meaningless. Yet the opening paragraph in the linked paper specifies that they are not, being “too serious to be shrugged aside”. Odd, I must say, that the thesis, as “too serious to be shrugged aside” as a ghost story, appeals to that very same pejorative conception as the ground for justifying it.
Inquiring minds want to know.....were you already familiar with this article, or did you do some research in order to comment, however clandestine such comment may be, on my “every change is succession in time”?
But even setting that aside, where in the levels of “logical decidability” does your response to it: “the floor changes from the living room to the bathroom”, fit in? And did you see, did it occur to you, that your floor changing response sustains the author’s anecdotal missive, “...It is curious that some anti-metaphysicians have relied on some instantiation criterion of empirical confirmation without realizing that this lets in a host of untestable metaphysical doctrines...”
Let’s just call me confused. Might be my fault, but it seems to me you’ve always presented yourself as anti-metaphysical, yet this article presents metaphysical sentences is a more favorable light than you’ve allowed them. And if you’re not an anti-metaphysicalist, how did you not approve my “change” comment, but rather, attempt to refute it with propositions entirely insufficient for doing so?
Anyway......interesting read, especially the latter parts.
I read the article as an undergraduate. I hope you will not be disappointed to be told that it's return to my interest had nothing to do with your comment about change. I was reminded of it while considering conspiracy theories, and on rereading found a few bits in it that I thought worthy of some extra consideration. Hence this thread.
I hadn't considered your "Every change is a succession in time" as an all-and-some proposition; indeed, it looks to me to be a simple universal statement, especially since it was falsified so easily by my example. In so far as I gave it further consideration, it reinforced my prejudice that Kantian metaphysical notions didn't survive 19th century developments in maths and physics.
I think I have a better understanding of Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction now than when I last read this article, and I'm curious about how Watkins addresses that. I also noted the mention of physicalism with regard to theory of mind, and intend to check that out for more interesting arguments.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, not quite, although that's the pop view. Unfalsified theories are not assumed to be true. They are taken as helpful, to greater or lesser extents, and hence the need for Lakatos' research programs to acknowledge the variety of unfalsified theories. For my money, Feyerabend put paid to Poppers program (alliteration unintended...), showing firstly that it did not solve the problem of induction, and secondly that it is not the way science actually works.
It's good to see tha there are folk here who have a grasp of falsificationism and critical rationalism's approach to metaphysics. Other posts here show a clear lack of understanding of what is involved, and a failure to engage with the article, which is disappointing.
Some passages from the SEP entry on Mind-Brain Identity Theory
[quote=David Lewis] My argument is this: The definitive characteristic of any (sort of) experience as such is its causal role, its syndrome of most typical causes and effects. But we materialists believe that these causal roles which belong by analytic necessity to experiences belong in fact to certain physical states. Since these physical states possess the definitive character of experiences, they must be experiences.[/quote]
So - my avenue of attack is that, whilst it's perfectly fine to theorise about the neurophysiology of 'pain' or 'sensation' or even 'experience' in some general sense, how could it be possible to equate neural or organic states with rational arguments? Is a simple logical syllogism or arithmetic proof identical to a 'brain state'? Is it conceivable that there is a singular disposition of neurochemicals that must always be associated with specific propositions? I think when you put it that way, it is obviously preposterous. It is, in my view, a consequence of regarding brain-states and physical configurations of matter as having the attributes of symbolic representation, where a brain state 'stands for' or 'represents' a proposition. But that in itself is a confusion or equivocation about the meaning of 'representation'.
But, even if this were true, how could it ever be demonstrated? Given the massive complexity of the brain and 'brain-states' - more neural pathways than stars in the sky, it's said - how could you establish any kind of identity between neural data and symbolic meaning?
I mean, I can possibly accept that a neuroscientist could discern 'pain states' from neural data, as presumably they might evoke a recognisable chemical footprint. But what, pray tell, would be the chemical signature of the law of the excluded middle? Of of any other kind of rational proposition? How could you map syntactical or algebraic expressions against 'states of the brain'?
I think this is far more fruitful line of attack against materialist theories of mind than the never-ending arguments about the nature of experience.
The Black Hole Information Paradox is a big issue in physics because information loss would mean processes cannot in principle be time reversible, which is not the case with most of physics. Thus there is ongoing theoretical work to resolve the paradox. There is some deep relationship between information, energy and thermodynamics, I believe.
The question I have with this sort of thing is where is the empirical basis? It's not like we can observe a black hole evaporate and then measure the state of the Hawking Radiation to see whether any info was lost.
Don't be so hasty. This video suggests otherwise, at least form some physicists:
This is a form of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM in which the wave function is just quantifying our knowledge of the system, not the underlying physical reality. The idea is that we set up experiments that have a certain relationship with what's being measured, and we make observations of the experimental results. This is a correlation between the world and our observations. But we can't say what the reality is when we're not performing the experiment. There is one, but it's hidden from us beyond the correlation. Kant is brought up as is anti-realism regarding the math (but not the world as it is).
And thus the suggestion is that theories like MWI and the Pilot-Wave are pointless, because we can't know the state of the world without performing an experiment.
The interesting part in the article was that Watkins pointes out that the theory that mind is correlated to physical states is neither provable nor falsifiable.
Nevertheless I still reject the view that there is more to the mind than neural functions embedded in a body embedded in a world.
No, I'll not go into it. It's outside the scope of this thread, it's outside my present interests and in the end it is just a comfortable prejudice that I use in selecting what to read next... not Kant.
Nor am I going to spend a half hour watching a dubious video that could be summarised in a couple of paragraphs.
Conservation laws are bookkeeping strategies for physicists. Odd, how they work.
None of these qualify as an "unprovable" inductive conclusions, or universals, which is the substance here. One could make up all sorts of nonsense and insist that its both unprovable (due to inadequately defined terms) and also unfalsifiable (due to the impossibility of testing what is inadequately defined), but that's not really relevant.
What is relevant is that valid inductive conclusions are rejected under the pretense of "unfalsifiable".
That's your religion.
We could just say that one of the characteristics of metal is that it expands when heated. Anything else would be, at best, semi-metal. We can simply redefine words or make up new words to resolve the first example. It's a language issue.
Religious claims are just as conspiratorial as many political claims. Some claims are more useful than others, depending on your goals and more fundamental beliefs. Those that already assume there are aliens, gods, or Republicans/Democrats out to oppress you, will see these types of claims as more proof of their assumptions. Not very useful to those without those assumptions, and require the same empirical evidence as you provided for your car being in the garage to believe in UFOs being secret military garages.
Quoting Banno
Again, here we could just define effects as having causes. Any event without a cause would be classified as being a non-effect. It seems that many metaphysical problems can be resolved by changing the way we use words.
Purely out of habit, and the difficulty presented by the alternatives, I’d wager.
I spent about 20 minutes on the article, I rather like him. I don’t think the author has a reductionist ax to grind, but on the other hand, he’s very much Anglo-American plain language, i.e. simplifying the arguments in syllogistic form.
What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? You don't need to give a detailed exposition, just a brief outline of how a theory that is not in physicalist terms might look.
I think it’s a cogent argument, supported with quotations from the SEP article on the exact issue. Armstrong was Professor of the department where I did two years of undergrad philosophy and I’m familiar with his ideas. As far as I’m concerned, mine is an original argument which directly challenges the idea of correspondence between mind and brain. If you have a counter, as distinct from an assertion, I’ll adjust my argument accordingly.
Assuming the mind is explained as a function of the brain. There's quite a few people who think this has not been the case, at least for consciousness, intentionality and intelligence in general.
If the mind could be fully explained, then we'd have a neural account for propositions, as Banno has pointed out. But we don't have anything like that.
After all this time, I still have no idea :-)
Yes, and I’m arguing that the ‘argument from reason’ is a much better argument than Chalmer’s argument from ‘what it is like to be...’. If the elements of reason can’t be explained in terms of brain-states, then the lynchpin of materialist theory of mind fails; mind is not explicable in terms of what brains do.
They only appear as "unfalsifiable" because you have not defined your terms, "God", "exist". Once you provide clear definitions you'll see what I mean. That "unfalsifiable" could mean something other than true is only the case when terms are ambiguous.
What is it you think "unfalsifiable" means?
Thermodynamics teach that information can be lost, is in practice lost all the time, and thus that some events are irreversible. When you burn a book and spread the ashes, it becomes hard to read. When somebody dies, she becomes hard to resuscitate. When a species becomes instinct, it’s hard to recreate it... If tomorrow our planet was swallowed by a black hole, I imagine the planet would melt into some particle soup, and us too. I seriously doubt that we would be able to keep talking about Schopenhauer and Descartes on the forum, unaffected.
Did anyone understand the article? I'm responding to your examples. If you're examples aren't good representations of what was said in the article, it makes me wonder if you understand what you read, or if you have critically examined what you read in the article.
Any claim made without empirical evidence, which is the same as saying without justification, is a claim about the ontological status of a belief, not the ontological status of real UFOs in real secret military garages.
Any claim made without evidence can be safely understood to actually be saying, "I believe...[the claim]". The claim is about a metaphysical belief, not a metaphysical state of affairs independent of your belief.
Lakatos' intention, as far as I can tell, is to make falsificationism soften its stance. His notion of science as a research program is falsfication-tolerant - in a sense, the work of accommodating inconsistent obesrvations is delegated to so-called auxiliary hypotheses that are constructed/modified to safeguard what he terms as hard core, non-negotiable assumptions of a scientific theory in question. His goal in formulating such a paradigm for science is to prevent the immediate and total rejection of scientific theories based on inconsistent observations which, as far as I can tell, he considers to be detrimental to scientific progress.
Plus, Lakatos seems to be a man of moderation - he sets a limit to the extent to which auxiliary hypotheses can save a scientific theory. He differentiates between progressive research programs and degenerative research programs. What distinguishes the two is that adjustments made to a theory (new/modified auxiliary hypotheses) are productive in the former but in the case of the latter, all the adjustments manage to accomplish is saving the hard core of a research program from being falsified.
Lakatos' genius duly acknowledged, there's a slight problem with this conception of science as research programs. What's the role of falsificationism at the auxiliary hypotheses level?
Is it Popper-like in the sense if observation is inconsistent with an auxiliary hypothesis then that auxiliary hypothesis is considered falsified and consigned to the garbage heap?
If yes, the fate of the hard core of a scientific theory is ultimately decided by falsficiationism. The introduction of auxiliary hypotheses as some kind of a buffer between a scientific theory (the hard core) and falsificationism is pointless. This situation is like that of a person who's fed up being dependent on his parents and so decides to shift the burden of ensuring his welfare to his sister but, the catch is, his sister depends on his parents. Reminds me of someone... :rofl:
If no, then that means auxiliary theories will need their own auxiliary theories and these, in turn, will need other auxiliary theories and so on and pretty soon we'll have a theory that's grotesquely bloated and beyond manageable.
I'm afraid Lakatos' concept of research programs fails at the task it was set out to do.
Paul Feyerabend seems to want a laissez-faire type of environment for science but then such a state of affairs would fail to distinguish science from non-science. If anything goes then everything is science. Is it? Maybe it is...you never know. I've heard scientists complaining about philosophical interference but this is scientific hegemony at a whole new level.
As for my claim that science is an argumentum ad ignorantiam, you're correct in that scientific theories are described as [s]true[/s] best available explanatory frameworks. However, the fact remains that the credibility of scientific theories, in Popper's universe, rests on them not being proven false and that this bears a striking resemblance to a known fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) should, at the very least, keep us on our toes.
Yes.
A statement is verifiable if it can be shown to be true.
A statement is falsifiable if it can be shown to be false.
Consider statements of the form "there exists an x such that p(x)", those are verifiable but not falsifiable. Why? To verify it, all you need to do is find an example, to falsify it, you need to go out and look at everything ever and evaluate whether there's an x in it such that p(x). "There exists a non-white swan" - go out and find it. You think there isn't one? Have you looked everywhere?
Consider statements of the form "all x are p(x)", those are falsifiable but not verifiable. Why? To falsify it, all you need to do is find an x such that p(x) doesn't hold. To verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x ever and see that it satisfies p(x). "All swans are white" - have you seen every swan?
[hide=*](Both of those kinds of statement need some circumstance to flesh out the quantifiers "there exists" - where? When? "every" - in what collection of relevant contexts?)[/hide]
Those two statement types can be intersected to produce an "all and some" statement. Those go: "for every x there exists a y such that (blah)". Those are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Why? In order to verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x. In order to falsify it, for a particular x, you'd need to show that no such y exists and thereby look at everything ever.
If you're coming at philosophy from the angle that all talk which is relevant to finding things out must be either verifiable or falsifiable; like caricatures of postivists and falsificationalists; it would be surprising if those "all and some" statements play any role in scientific discourse. And they do.
"For every collection of masses there exists a centre of mass"
"For every force there exists a medium which carries it"
And so on. Examples abound. So they play a role in scientific discourse, but (let's grant) that they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable. What kind of role do they play if they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable? The article suggests that they play a regulative one. Regulative how? They inspire scientists, or philosophers, to think about the world differently. The world looks much different if you imagine forces without a carrying medium vs if you imagine that such media are required. They inspire the generation of different hypotheses about the world; and so they play a coordinating role in how we find things out about the world.
Neither verifiable nor falsifiable but shapes how we think about the world - sounds like metaphysics to me!
Someone who really disliked metaphysics playing a role in coordinating scientific conduct might respond to this by; yes yes, such statements play a coordinating role in the generation of hypotheses, but that coordinating role is strictly normative. It tells us what hypotheses scientists and philosophers believe ought to be investigated, not anything about the world - talk about which is confined to falsifiable or verifiable statements. All and some statements are confined to norms of methodology; they're methodological prescriptions not conceptually related to descriptions of reality.
There are two problems with that; the less interesting and easy problem is that there are people who distinguish between the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of all and some statements in their conduct. Someone might believe nature is in general random (descriptive) but believe that scientists ought to treat it as if it is not in circumscribed contexts (prescriptive), so the two have a distinction in practice.
The more interesting and hard problem is that all and some statements don't just inspire research hypotheses, they are conceptually related to research hypotheses and thus inspire research hypotheses. "All and some" statements purport to tell us how stuff works, so we go out looking as if it works that way.
And if all and some statements play this regulative role in science, what stops them playing a similar regulative role in politics and morality? The article looks there too, but I won't.
And if it's neither, then the statement is verifiable and falsifiably shown to be nothing other than an unjustified belief, which is to say that it is neither true or false, which is to say that the statement is useless.
The whole point of the claimant omitting "I believe..." at the beginning of the statement is to get the reader to believe, and possibly to fool themselves into thinking that it is more than a just an unjustified belief. But if there is no evidence either way then the lack of evidence is verifiable evidence that the statement is nothing more than an unjustified belief.
In principle, burning a book is reversible, as is a corpse. It's just not feasible for us to do it. But according to the physics, everything you mentioned could be reversed. The information for doing so is conserved in the fire, ashes, decaying body and so on. The environment conserves the information.
Hawking demonstrated that black holes seem to be different. When they evaporate, the information to recover what fell into the black hole is lost. However, progress has been made on how that might not actually be the case. The radiation left over after the evaporation might contain the information, provided one has the right sort of theory for that to be the case.
I think it means exactly what it looks like it means, not possible to demonstrate the falsity of. The point is that the common epistemological usage of this term is unacceptable because propositions are asserted to be unfalsifiable without due justification. Justification requires a defining of the terms, and a logical demonstration, (empirical demonstration in this case being out of the question). If justification is not required, then "unfalsifiable" has no epistemological import and it's application is arbitrary and subjective. It has become a cop-out term, employed in a lazy attempt to avoid logical rigor. The way it is employed, its meaning is basically 'I don't understand the ontological concepts involved here, therefore I designate the proposition as unfalsifiable'. Consider timwoods examples.
Unless there are standards as to what constitutes "justifiably unfalsifiable" the concept ought not be given epistemological status. And if we apply the necessary rigor (well-defined terms), I believe we'll find what I stated, "unfalsifiable" means impossible to be falsified, therefore necessarily true. Otherwise "unfalsifiable" has no objective status, meaning 'I personally, or we as a group, have not the capacity to falsify this (which is in fact falsifiable) due to the deficiencies of our capacities.
Quoting fdrake
Thanks fdrake for the explanation. Notice that there is nothing here to give "unfalsifiable" any real status. So long as we continue to observe every instance of x with an open mind, such that we continue to allow for the possibility that it might be falsified, there is no assertion of "unfalsifiable". Therefore we may leave open the question of whether "there exists a non-white swan", and maintain that the proposition "all swans are white" is still falsifiable.
The appearance of "unfalsifiable" is just a symptom of ill-definition. If we define "swan" so as to exclude the possibility of a non-white swan, we exclude the possibility of the proposition "there exists an x such that p(x)", as an invalid (contradictory) proposition. Such a creature could not be a swan by that definition. But Banno would reject this as "essentialism", not realizing the damage which rejecting essentialism does to the human capacity for deductive logic, by allowing ill-definition and its consequent assertion, "unfalsifiable". "Unfalsifiable" which really means I am certain that we will not find an off-coloured swan, but I'm not certain enough to define "swan" in that way, really just allows for uncertainty to gain a foothold in epistemology. The alternative, to maintain that "there exists an x such that p(x)", has the status of falsifiable, until we are satisfied that it is a proven fact, then define "p" in this way, such that it is an empirical certainty, thereby avoiding the unnecessary middle position of "unfalsifiable", provides a much more reasonable epistemology.
I wouldnt need to look everywhere, only where swans live, or in its genetic code where there would be the potential for non- white feathers to be expressed, just as one might have the code for brown eyes in their genes even though they have blue eyes.
Then there is the possibility of defining swans as all being white, and non-white "swans" aren't actually swans at all.
Yes. The quantifiers need some domain associated with them. The original article goes some way to specifying the kind of domains they're talking about.
Like a rotten corpse can be brought back to life, in principle. All you have to do is convince the bacteria eating it to work backward in time, deproliferate (I suppose mitosis is reversible, in principle) and reconstruct the dead body the way they found it when it died.
In principle. But in reality, it never ever happens, because the odds are beyond minuscule. Just like you rarely see bullets ejected by a wounded body right back into the hole of a handgun canon, though it is possible, in principle.
If I might interject, Popper's original formulation was simply that an empirical hypothesis is one that can be overturned by evidence or observation. He gave two examples of hypotheses, or sets of hypotheses, that could not be falsified, namely, marxism and freudianism. Conversely, Einstein's theory of relativity was confirmed by observation of stellar paralax in 1919. Had those results not been obtained, then the theory would have been falsified - which of course it has never been, but it could have been in principle, hence it's an empirical theory.
Which is akin to what I've been saying. The more specific we are with our definitions, the more falsifiable those definitions are. To assert the existence of some thing that contradicts the category you are defining the thing as (ie there are planets smaller than mercury that exist) either means that we adjust the definition of the category, or put the thing in a whole new category. The latter occurred when we categorized Pluto as a dwarf planet, instead of a planet.
Watkin's article is in the same vein as Lakatos, in that Popper's demarcation criterion was seen to rule out far too much as unscientific. Watkins is drawing attention to the unscientific nature of materialism, field theories, and most tellingly, conservation laws.
Lakatos' method of research programs looks itself much like an ad hoc attempt to save Popper's demarcation from falsification. Scientists do not wok in this way. That's the criticism from Feyerabend in a nutshell, and that's were treating science as distinct from other discipline because of its method comes apart.
What we are left with is replacing method with a set of ethical principles, which include things such as being open to revision of one's ideas, being clear about one's assumptions, and so on.
Falsification fails to demarcate science from non-science both because scientists make use of non-falsifiable theories (as Watkins shows) and because falsification fails to solve the problem of induction. Nevertheless the relation between the logical structure of theories, as described by Popper and Watkins, is well worth considering.
The interesting thing is that Popper argued that metaphysical speculations or propositions play an ineliminable role in science. Even though they are not verifiable or falsifiable, they may lead to other hypotheses which are falsifiable. String Theory may be an example, so the so-called popperazi would not be following their master in condemning it.
Why should unfalsifiable propositions be considered to be true, as opposed to possibly true or false, or neither true nor false? I'm not seeing the reasoning.
As to the "all mules have four legs", why "must [we] retreat to, "Some mules have four legs," or most anyway?" The proposition is falsifiable, from which it does not follow that it is falsified, or even that it ever will be falsified. Of course it may have already been falsified, in which case we would have to retreat to the position ""Some mules have four legs," or most anyway." , where the retreat is on account of it being falsified, not on account of it merely being falsifiable.
The practice of science, insofar as it involves unfalsifiable speculations or propositions cannot be differentiated from other practices by method alone, but it still seems right that scientific hypotheses, if those are defined as being falsifiable, can be differentiated from non-scientific hypotheses. The upshot then would be that the practice of science involves both scientific and non-scientific hypotheses (or speculations or propositions). Popper acknowledges this.
Yeah. I agree. I think we can put it down to a few folk not being familiar with Popper's account.
SO, to put on Feyerabend's hat, astrology is a science in so far as it makes falsifiable claims; that the moon is in Sagittarius implies trouble for fish, perhaps leading to a falsifiable claim that all fish prices will drop, or some such.
I suspect such demarcation criteria will ultimately fail. The Watkins article goes towards showing why. It places some clearly scientific proposals, such as conservation laws, on the wrong side of the demarcation.
Many years ago I devised an argument that the mind could not be identical with the brain. It went something like this:
If both true and false propositions were really nothing but neural configurations then since they are semantically distinguishable they ought to be neurologically distinguishable.
I developed this argument into other variants involving logically valid and invalid arguments, and the way in which the purported conditioning of rational thought by evolution ought to undermine our confidence in it and so on.
I have come to think that these kinds of arguments are quite naive. They are neither verifiable or falsifiable, but unlike the unfalsifiable "auxilliary" hypotheses involved in the practice of science, they don't seem to be useful either, because they don't seem capable of leading to any falsifiable hypotheses.
I would like to note, though, that most of its claims regarding personality types, as opposed to perhaps its claims about coming events, are not falsifiable, or at least not definitively so, since they rely on judgements of character which are subjective.
I'm not so keen. I wonder if we can do better by demarcating in terms of ethical principles. IF an astrologer were willing to change their predictions in the face of an analysis of their results, we might make some progress in moving astrology into the sciences.
This is the issue that Davidson addresses with anomalous monism.
I choose to raise my arm and the darn thing goes up, as Searle points out; undeniably there is a causal link between mind and body, and in both directions. Hence, Monism. Yet no strict laws can set the link between belief and action. Hence, the causes are anomalous.
Better, a good scientist - and I mean that as an ethical judgement.
I don't think they are at all. They're counter to the principle physicalist and materialist theories of mind. Armstrong's work, whose magnum opus is Materialist Theory of Mind, 'involved identifying beliefs and desires with states of the brain'. The identification of the mind with the brain is the lynchpin of all materialism, take that out and the whole structure collapses.
(By the way, Popper co-authored a book with Sir John Eccles in defense of dualism, 'The Self and its Brain'.)
So there's nothing naive about the kind of argument I'm proposing. There's the whole family of 'arguments from reason', which argue that logical necessity can't be reduced to physical causality without undermining reason itself. Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism falls under this umbrella. They're all serious arguments. So maybe you just dismiss them, because they're not amenable to your own 'presumptive materialism'. Better just to declare them 'unfalsifiable', when really those criteria aren't essential to arguments of this kind.
Quoting Banno
That style of argument reduces a very subtle issue to a simplistic truism. It's like Moore's 'here is my hand', or, for that matter, 'Stove's Gem' - sweeping, simplistic declarations which want to sweep the table clean, without really indicating any real idea of what is at stake.
In any case, Davidson also illustrates what I mean by 'presumptive materialism'. It's the view that, as dualist philosophies of mind are invariably associated with acceptance of the notion of immaterial reals, then they have to be rejected as matter of principle, meaning that whatever view you take, it must presume that physicalism is basically correct. Which everyone of his generation and position would presume to be the case.
Quoting Banno
I drew that comparison too, though I saw a hole in the account.
The hole is: using the "all and some" logical form for the role that "research hard cores" play in Lakatos is that precisely how an "all and some" statement could be rejected needs a theory.
A naive account of falsificationalism might have that the central components of a research program can be defended from potentially refuting evidence by adopting auxiliary hypotheses in the following way; if the research program's central assumptions are A, and the refuting evidence claims not A but can be interpreted as not A or B, B can then be added to the research program's hypotheses provisionally to defend A from falsification. A and B are both falsifiable in that account, and the study showing not A has a modus tollens impact on the research program. If the central hypothesis is an all and some statement, it's not falsifiable, so no candidate study could have the same modus tollens impact on it. I'm not saying that it couldn't be refuted, I'm saying that the model of refutation modus tollens impact provides in naive falsificationalism doesn't work on central components of a research program that contains "all and some" statements - something else is needed.
I imagine that comes down to spelling out a sense of conceptual entailment - an attempt to answer the questions.
(1) From the "normal science" side: how does an all and some statement suggest/generate falsifiable (or verifiable) research hypotheses?
(2) From the "paradigm shift" side: how does evidence or theory refute an "all or some" statement?
Yes! Brilliant, aren't they! They work because they change the whole picture, like seeing the rabbit as a duck, or better, like seeing that you can choose to see either the rabbit or the duck.
So to the present example, any form of dualism faces the insurmountable obstacle of explaining causality across the great divide. Hence, Monism.
It's not difficult at all. Look around you and right in front of you. All the devices and inventions you see, including, most notably, the device you're using to create your argument, are the inventions of the human mind. The human mind can peer into the realm of the not-yet-existent, the potentially-possible, which, by definition, does not exist, and pull things out of it. It uses mathematics and reason to discover properties of matter which could never be found by mere sensible experience. So humans are inhabitans of that dual realm of physical and mental throughout their existence. Which is something similar to what Popper argued for.
There's no way to account for or predict these abilities on the basis of physics. Hence, dualism. But it's very easy to deny in a culture where matter~energy now occupy the role previously assigned to the divine intellect.
If the mind is a function of the physical em-brained body or embodied brain then mental and physical processes and activities will require different kinds of descriptions and accounts. This fact does nothing to support the idea that there is anything other than one basic kind of substance so
Quoting Wayfarer
Popper was not defending metaphysical dualism, even though he may be considered to be a mind/body dualist, a methodological dualist (as we all really are) on account of his differentiation between physical and mental descriptions.
Isn't this dealt with in the article - being the topic of Section VII? Or have I misunderstood you?
Quoting fdrake
In Lakatos' formulation, and without checking his papers, a research program is never utterly falsified, it just becomes so mired in ad hoc hypotheses that progress (a loaded term) becomes impossible, and researchers move on to more productive areas.
Yes.
Different ways of articulating the same thing, such that they have little in common.
Yes, there is. Read Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe.
https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=kauffman+at+home+in+the+universe&qid=1609370074&sr=8-1
Yes, that sounds about right.
There's a critique of Davidson by Feser here which concludes:
i.e. exactly what I am describing as 'presumptive materialism'.
From Amazon's description of the book:
We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: [i]that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.[/i]*
*Underlining and emphases mine.
That is something none of the forms of materialism that I'm criticizing would dare admit as it's plainly teleological. It sounds a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins.
Note this exchange between Kaufmann and John Horgan:
That new book is A World Beyond Physics:
Hence - not physicalist. Science itself has evolved beyond materialism, 1960's academic philosophy is about 100 years behind.
You're forgetting the other half of the picture. If the proposition is also unverifiable, then why should we believe it is true?
As the article pointed out there are kinds of propositions which are unverifiable: "all x are Y", but falsifiable, and there are other kinds of propositions which are unfalsifiable: "some x are Y", but verifiable. In the latter case your position would entail that it is necessarily true that some x are Y, but that is nonsense; we could not know that until and unless it had been verified.
Note "natural order", not supernatural order, and you purport to be an opponent of naturalism. For Kauffman the natural order is "self-organization, selection, and chance". You need to read the book and take it in if you want to understand his position.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't read the new book. I don't believe he's changed his position, but I may be mistaken. He says in At Home in the Universe that physics alone cannot describe the processes of phase transition and autocatalytic systems because they are statistical in nature; that is they rely on nothing beyond chance. Hence complexity theory.
To say that something cannot be described or accounted for in terms of physics is not say that there is anything beyond the stochastic behavior of physical systems at work. There does not need to be any "divine" influence, for example, and as I read him in the earlier work Kauffman is certainly not aiming to support the notion that there is any such thing. If you want to argue that he is supporting such ideas in the later work you will need to present citations from the author himself.
The paper makes a good point : not all "influential" theories are "confirmable". :smile:
Watkins : "There are two other kinds of existential statement which are unempirical. The first alleges the existence of something un-localised and abstract, e.g. 'There is a law of nature governing these phenomena'. This statement will get verified, or at least strongly confirmed, if a hypothesis happens to be invented from which can be derived numerous precise and successful predictions about the phenomena in question. But it will not be refuted if no one manages to hit upon such a hypothesis".
For example, Quantum Physicists have, to the dismay of Einstein, hypothesized non-local phenomena, that meet the criteria for spooky Metaphysics, but have nevertheless been useful and "influential" in Physics. :nerd:
"Nonlocality suggests that universe is in fact profoundly different from our habitual understanding of it,"
https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_quantum_nonlocality.html
So, as the paper suggests, we should not automatically reject all metaphysical theories out-of-hand, just because they are not empirical, but merely inferential. In some cases, they help us make sense of realities that are "outside of human sense perception". Hence, they are "Influential", true or not. :chin:
Metaphysics : referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception. . . .
. . .Under the skeptical analyses of the philosophical movements known as postmodernism and deconstructionism, all of these facts have resulted in a modern repudiation of both metaphysics and science. Their criticisms are based on the cultural and historical relativity of all knowledge. These two philosophical "schools" deny any existence at all of an objective or universal knowledge. Thus, metaphysical claims stand today between the absolutist claims of science (scientism) and the complete relativism of postmodernism and deconstructionism.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/metaph-body.html
As conceived by ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy, wherein there’s an irreconcilable division between ‘science and religion’, and scientific naturalism is to supersede religion, by ‘explaining’ it, and everything else, in terms of a biological adaptation. And of course you then must conclude that when Kaufman, whom you brought up, says that ‘physics alone can not tell us’, that actually he’s saying that there’s nothing beyond physics.
Quoting Gnomon
:up:
I remember that he says in the book that he is not proposing anything beyond complex physical systems; systems, however, which cannot be explained just in terms of physics. I think you just don't want to get that. Biology in general is not reducible to physics, even though biology is not anything other than physical. Read the book again, with an open mind, and then get back to me.
Pretty much.
It's important to note the specialist use of "metaphysical" to mean "unfalsifiable"; and "unfalsifiable" as being of specified logical form - those containing uncircumscribed existential statements, and their variations... anything that does not fit modus tollens...
It defers the problem of how you go about "weighing" an all and some statement to the context of the all and some statement:
Which seems a cop out to me. The account is happy to quantify over research programs and abstract over their content, it's also happy to talk about the types of relations between components of research programs - relating them is what all and some statements do. But when it comes to a general description of how this regulative role of all and some statements occurs - it defers to context, appealing to a pragmatic inability to abstract in a similar way to what the article's already done.
IE:
How?
But that's not quite right, either.
I don’t know much about string theory but IF it cannot possibly be falsified, then I agree it is not a scientific theory. The problem with unfalsifiable theories is that they have no predictive value. You cannot use them to predict what will happen next. Therefore they do not add to our control and abilities. All they do is help us make sense (describe) an event or condition after it occurred.
I personally disagree with Popper on psychoanalysis. True that Freud himself kept tinkering his theories all the time and did not base them on much evidence, but his theories are nevertheless inherently falsifiable, and his tinkering of them shows an effort to fit the data better. E.g. he added ‘Thanatos’ (desire of death) to ‘Eros’ (the libido) after WW1, because he could not explain otherwise the extent of hatred, death and destruction seen in this war. So he postulated an instinct of death and destruction, operating side by side with an instinct of love and life. That shows a bona fide effort to explain experience. Other tenets of Freud have been invalidated by experience, such as ‘penis envy’.
Finally, psychoanalysis have led to the development of many related theories and approaches, some of which are practical and effective, e.g. transactional analysis, or Bateson’s analysis of family dynamics and ‘double-binds’.
The key to understanding the relationship between philosophy (metaphysics) and science (physics) is to realize that philosophy is a science. And the conclusions of one branch of the investigation of reality must not contradict those of another. All knowledge must be integrated
At root, science identifies and integrates sensory evidence (which is the nature of reason). Science is essentially based, not on experiment, but on observation and logic; the act of looking under a rock or into a telescope is a scientific act. So is the act of observing and thinking about your own mental processes (proof of one's conclusions to others comes later, but that is argumentative, not inquisitive.) Science is willing to accept and integrate information from any observational source, without concern about persuading other people.
They are both the same in that they both gather knowledge through observation and then classify this knowledge, and through classification, elaborate general principles or ideas. Science is simply organized knowledge.
The intermediary and the disguised analysis are the interesting cases.
If it's disguised analysis, the all and some statement should somehow engender a falsifiable statement; but then if you treat that engendering as logical entailment the original all and some statement can be modus tollens'd through the falsifiable one. That would make the all and some statement falsifiable, so it can't be that. So what sense of entailment is it in the disguised case?
Quoting tim wood
We actually do make propositions which are supposed to be true by definition, therefore not requiring testing, as is the case in mathematical axioms. But I do not consider these axioms to actually be "true", as you might know from my postings on other threads. Further, these axioms do tend to get tested through application and usefulness. However there seems to be confusion on this forum as to how usefulness relates to true. The usefulness of a mathematical axiom does not verify it as true. So these axioms get into a sort of limbo position where they are unverified, and unfalsified, yet heavily used, therefore very influential.
Therefore, if any propositions ought to be represented as unfalsifiable, and unverifiable, these would be mathematical axioms. Our mode for testing them is usefulness rather than truthfulness. So in science we have a clash of these two distinct forms of judgement. We tend to think that scientific hypotheses are judged according to principles of empirical observation. And that is what is supposed to constitute a judgement of truth. However, we rarely take into account how the mathematical axioms which are judged according to usefulness, rather than empirical truth, influence these empirical judgements.
Quoting Janus
Unverifiable and unfalsifiable are supposed to be two opposing extremes, a proposition which is claimed to be both ought to be simply be an irrelevant subjective statement, of no import to science. However, we have the status of mathematical axioms being "useful" as explained above, which demonstrates otherwise. So we are tempted to believe that such a proposition (like a mathematical axiom) is true because it is useful and influential.
Quoting Janus
You misunderstand what I said. What I said is that the statement "some X are Y" ought not be classified as unfalsifiable simply on the basis of the apprehended human capacity to judge the truth or falsity of it. That would make "unfalsifiable" a subjective judgement without any objective principles by which we might make that judgement. It does not render "some X are Y" as necessarily true, because only propositions which are truly and objectively "unfalsifiable" would be necessarily true, and this proposition is not.
Circumscribing reduces all-and-some statements to falsifiable form. Conservation laws, for instance, are used in particular cases to predictable and falsifiable ends. Rolling marbles, for example, can be used to display conservation of momentum in a limited case. IF this did not occur, the universal application of the conservation law would not be falsified, but it would have been undermined. So when you rolled a marble int a string of marbles in a track, one marble flies off the other end, and apparently, momentum is conserved. If, instead, the marbles simply stoped dead still, and the experimented mumbled something about the momentum being taken up at some unspecified place in the universe in order to defend the conservation law, one would be less inclined to take the law as true.
That seems to be one way of doing it. "Reduces" hides an awful lot of work though.
Quoting Banno
Let's go through it as a worked example then.
A really general statement of the conservation of momentum would be "For all systems which have a translation invariant Lagrangian there exists a conserved quantity under that action; linear momentum". That's an all and some statement with a proof; so it's verifiable and falsifiable in some sense of both words. However, by itself it's not a description of a reality; it's not put to that use. If that statement was taken as the hard core, it's an all and some statement of a different type since it can be shown to be true, and it can be shown to not apply (if the Langrangian isn't translation invariant).
However, it is quite suggestive of the claim that "Every physical system whose dynamics aren't sensitive to where in space it takes place will conserve linear momentum". That one has a lot of flexibility to it; points of ambiguity for auxiliary hypotheses at "physical system", "dynamics", the concept of sensitivity, how "conserve" applies when friction's thrown into the system and so on. Seems more like the all and some statement talked about in the paper.
Then, allegedly, someone looks at a series of marbles in a row, plinks one into it to start a series of impacts, and sees the end one moves off at a comparable speed as the one they threw into it. Through some series of conceptual moves, this is linked right back to the maths.
Going from the first stage - the mathematical theorem - to the second isn't just a case of quantifier restriction, it's actually changing the type of entity considered. A similar alchemy of types occurs in the transition from the second to the third; you go from mathematically suggestive generic descriptions of things to considering concrete, manipulable, particulars. The first lot is just about maths, the second one is some weird mix of math and reality, and the last one's about some marbles in a row that shunt about.
If you want to construe that as an operation of circumscription, it doesn't seem to conserve the types of entities considered. It's not, I guess one way of putting it, a metaphysically inert operation; you change what the statement is considered to apply to between stages. Another way of putting it, the "for all" in the first bit refers only to mathematical objects, the "for all" in the second bit seems to refer to some weird halfway stage between concrete particulars and mathematical abstractions, the "applied instance" of the marbles seems just to consider concrete particulars.
Nevertheless, it seems true that the first is suggestive of the second and the second is suggestive of the third. You know your logic, so I'm sure you can see that they're not following by modus ponens. They seem a lot more artful, more similar to transcendental deductions or interpretive links than strict logical entailments.
Oh, yes. Feyerabend would have torn a new arse hole in such an argument. It has the pretence of rationality but on analysis, fails.
That's pretty much the case for any supposed scientific method.
This errs in failing to notice that science is social. One individual making their own observations is not science. A group actively engaging in a conversation aimed at explaining what they see, and willing to adjust their view to account for what others claim, is at least a start.
You should have noticed, from what I've posted, that I'm not at all interested in the conventional interpretation of "falsifiability". I believe it tends to be way off the mark. So I really don't know why you would make this suggestion to me. If you're content to sink into the quicksand of that interpretation, then so be it.
So, are mathematical axioms concerning infinity not level 4 statements? Are they verifiable or falsifiable?
So Galileo wasn't doing science when he devised the modern scientific method and performed his experiments in private, away from the watchful eyes of the theocracy?
If philosophy is social, then we have both made the same point - that philosophy IS a science.
Besides, other peoples claims are are not evidence. That is where you err. You still have to personally verify their claims. Other peoples' claims is just another personal observation anyway.
I don't think it implies necessary truth. For example, the claim that there is some particular configuration of stars and planets beyond the edge of the observable universe. That's unfalsifiable, because we can never check it out, no matter how close to the speed of light we accelerate a probe. But it's certainly not necessarily true.
Watkins seems aware of the problem of spelling out this sense of conceptual suggestiveness he's leaning on.
In "Between Analytic and Synthetic" (available for free on jstor with a public account), he sets out a hierarchy of concepts; at the top are things like haunted universe doctrines, at the bottom are observation statements. An observation statement is a report that something has been found to be the case by observation. Like "This substance dissolved in my sample of sulphuric acid". Their distinguishing property is that they are verifiable and falsifiable by observation alone.
At the next level of the hierarchy, he places instantial hypotheses. Instantial hypotheses predicate what they concern using only observable predicates. So "Every metal would dissolve in my sample of sulphuric acid" is instantial because you can check if a particular metal would dissolve in my sample. He calls an instantial hypothesis empirical if the conjunction of an instantial hypothesis and an observation statement entails another observation statement. So "Every metal dissolves in my sample of sulphuric acid" and "This is metal" gives you through modus ponens "This is would dissolve in my sample of sulphuric acid". Presumably "instantial" derives from taking an instance of the universal quantifier at the beginning of the statement, "all" goes to "this".
At the top level of the hierarchy, he places non-instantial (systems of) hypotheses. Non-instantial hypotheses are characterised by the property that if you take a conjunction of them with a collection of instantial hypotheses, they give rise to (his words!) observation statements, while themselves being neither falsifiable nor verifiable. A statement like "Every metal dissolves in some type of acid" is non-instantial - for any given metal it can't be checked without trying all the acids.
Observation statements are verifiable and falsifiable. Instantial hypotheses are falsifiable but not verifiable. Non-instantial hypotheses are neither falsifiable nor verifiable.
Notice however that "Every metal dissolved in some type of acid" actually contradicts the falsifiable statement "Gold is insoluable". Falsifiable because if you found a solvent for gold (eg aqua regia), it could be shown to be false by contradicting an observation (statement).
The paper tries to flesh out the regulatory role in a predictably falsificationalist way; haunted universe doctrines when taken in conjunction with observation statements stand in contradiction to some other observation statements. They are thus empirically meaningful.
However, it's got exactly the same hole as the other paper, and he knows it. The paper concludes:
.
The extent to which "rationally criticising and supporting" haunted universe doctrines saturates our investigations will be the extent to which the active "gives rise to" Watkins uses in characterising the regulatory role of haunted universe doctrines can be fleshed out by the passive constraints haunted universe doctrines place on the logical space of scientific hypotheses. Inspiring the investigation of a hypothesis is much different from constraining what hypotheses can be investigated.
...as if he never published.
Between Analytic and Synthetic. The title is curious. Quine's two dogmas was then a recent publication. It was also an attack on logical positivism. Watkins wants to highlight propositions that are neither synthetic nor analytic - hence the title; Quine wants to reject the very distinction between analytic and synthetic. So we have Watkins arguing for a spectrum of analyticity, while Quine argues that analyticity depends on a circular definition.
"Every metal would dissolve in my sample of Sulphuric acid" - but here is a metal that does not dissolve! "Ah, that looks like metal, but it isn't. It can't be because every real metal will dissolve in my acid..." Watkins takes little heed of the meanings of the words used; for Quine, the meaning is central, and yet open to such ambiguity. Feyerabend sees science as much more dependent on the whim of the scientist; the ad hoc hypothesis as a part of the scientific method.
Give an example.
I don't agree that such a claim is unfalsifiable. Just because we do not have the means to falsify it right now does not mean that we will not develop the means.
Quoting Banno
How about the obvious one then, the axiom of infinity? How would it be empirically verified? How could it be falsified?
All that means is that you are misusing the term "unfalsifiable".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It can't be, nor has anyone claimed that it can be.
Uh huh, so you say. But you're not interested in any interpretation which is not consistent with yours, so it really doesn't say very much.
Quoting Banno
Do you agree then, that these sorts of mathematical axioms, which are fundamental to the mathematics which is commonly used in scientific endeavours, are what the op refers to as Level 4 statements?
OK, you said that the statement can't be verified and it can't be falsified, yet it doesn't classify as level 4 by the standards of the op. How does it classify then? Surely it is in some way influential.
So axioms don't qualify as "statements" in the article of the op? They get a special exemption? See why I reject this interpretation?
The question was, "Was Galileo doing science before he published?"
I learned a long time ago, in a philosophy forum far, far away that you are more interested in hearing yourself talk than in actually trying to solve problems. That's why your threads are so long.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Please, and thank you.
The curious issue I have is about metaphysical hypotheses that are by definition consistent with any previous, current, or future experiential phenomenon. Take idealism, forms of neutral monism, most forms of ontology on substances, the brain in a vat, the simulation/matrix hypothesis, the misleading demon, being in a dream, etc. These are unfalsifiable in that you could most definitely define the terms well enough in question to the benefit of your intuitions regarding them but yet be no where closer to falsifying or proving any of them nor would it be the case that any one of them is necessarily true. . . it is also not the case that any are necessarily false.
The only true unfalsifiable series of propositions 'S' in the way you seem to be construing 'un-falsifiability' are statements or metaphysical viewpoints that for any experiential phenomenon 'E' they would be consistent with it.
This is to distinguish this from some practical weaker sense of 'un-falsifiability' that you portray here,
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your critique of this weaker sense of 'un-falsifiability' being an appeal to a healthy skepticism to our best scientific knowledge of the world that certain experiences, such as going beyond the observable horizon of our local cosmos, are physically impossible but such knowledge could be in fact over turned. Give or take a few hundred years, a thousand, or an indefinite amount of time until it is done so.
Yes, that's what I mean. Isn't this what falsifiable, and unfalsifiable mean? If empirical evidence can be used to prove the falsity of the proposition, then it is falsifiable. The only truly unfalsifiable propositions would be ones in which it is impossible to get empirical evidence to falsify them. The closest we have is tautologies, and self-evident truths, which might still be falsified if we alter definitions.
The "weaker sense" seems to say that if the empirical evidence is not readily available we can designate the proposition as "unfalsifiable". But the judgement as to whether the evidence is readily available or not, is completely subjective. So those who are too lazy to seek the evidence required to falsify the various metaphysical propositions will simply designate them as "unfalsifiable", and refuse to engage in the metaphysics required to determine how the various propositions are to be falsified.
Quoting substantivalism
I don't agree with this because I do not accept your initial premise. I don't think there is such a thing as a metaphysical hypothesis which is consistent with all experiential phenomena. If there was, then metaphysics would be complete, no more need to solve metaphysical problems, and no more metaphysics, which is the activity of trying to resolve such inconsistencies. We have self-evident truths, but they do not really qualify as metaphysical hypotheses. And a big part of philosophy involves analyzing supposed self-evident truths to determine whether they really are.
So, all that is required to falsity such hypotheses is to find the inconsistent phenomena. And all metaphysical hypotheses are falsifiable in this way, because no one is capable of completely understanding reality to the extent of producing a metaphysics which describes experiential phenomena to that degree of perfection.
Quoting substantivalism
Actually, there are other methods, like the application of deductive logic, using premises derived from empirical observation. That's the way we normally proceed don't we? We already go far beyond the observable horizon of our local cosmos, through logical proceedings, as quantum physics deals with particles which cannot be observed..
Why do you reject that? How can a material process experience pain or see sounds, hear colors (though normally it is the other way round), feel itch, dream, or love and be angry? Because these qualities are emergent like temperature? I think this is the hard problem.
So what experiential phenomenon is solipsism inconsistent with?
Consistency only requires that the truth of said metaphysics does not or cannot result in falsifying the metaphysical viewpoint via experiential phenomenon. This doesn't require it to be explanatorily useful or to 'solve' all metaphysical problems.