Janus

Yeah, I read all that before, but you stopped short of admitting that your identification of confirmationist thought with the invalid syllogism was in...

Sure, but all of that is unverifiable/ unfalsifiable surmise that we may or may not give our assent to, just like we may or may not relate to works of...

OK, so you agree that confirmationism and falsificationism are, as I have been arguing, two sides of the one coin with both being in play in science a...

All I meant to say is that objects can be measured, weighed, chemically analysed and we can talk about their shapes, colours, textures, parts, functio...

Yes, but if we cannot know it as an object, as @"Wayfarer" avers, then we cannot ever know it in the sense that we know the objects we can talk about.

I'd say this is more an example of knowing that there is something wrong with the question, than knowing we don't know something (that could be known ...

Your answer is suggestive of some mysterious 'other' form of existence; which we can never know. What use is it if we can never know it, though? I'd r...

No this is precisely the point your position relies on which is incorrect. "If P then Q, Q, therefore P" is simply an invalid deduction. Confirmationi...

LOL, I've already explicitly stated that if P is the proposition that the face is artificial, and Q is the presence of tool marks, and if we understan...

Of course it is; beliefs that derive from well-examined repeated experience should inspire more confidence than those which do not. I'm not changing t...

To be "consistent with the world" just is to be confirmed by observation, which is of course the same as to not have been (yet) falsified. The belief ...

Fair enough; you're pointing out the problem with the deductively invalid form of argument "If P then Q, Q therefore P", and arguing against verificat...

This is not correct, you keep presenting it backwards; which amounts to refuting a strawman. Sticking with the present example, the confirmationist me...

If you read this carefully you'll see that the falsificationist argument "if not-P then not-Q, Q, therefore P" relies on the the premise "if Q then P"...

Nothing I've said in this thread contradicts anything you've said there, though.

I can't help myself either because this response shows again that you have not been listening to what I've been saying. I have been pointing out that ...

That I do agree with!

No, I'll prove myself a liar and just say this one last thing: falsification and verification are two sides of the one coin as I see it. On this I'm s...

There are signs that rock formations are natural, and there are signs that they have been modified. If rock formations display tool marks then we know...

I pretty much agree with what you say here. :up:

So, all that means is that the word 'colour' means different things in different situations. Taking the word to mean a quality of an appearance, the a...

Right, so by your very own argument God makes a difference in the world. But that still doesn't tell us whether God exists or not. The point is that a...

Inaccuracy is not a black and white thing; there are obviously degrees. Although we cannot presently know it is always possible there is a mass we can...

:up:

None of our models can ever be definitively shown to be accurate models of reality, or for that matter be shown not to be. So, So now you claim that i...

I think 'seeing red' is a valid way of talking about certain visual perceptions. But it is abstracted from the usual context where the red belongs to ...

Showing an inaccuracy does not falsify a theory. We need to know why that inaccuracy is appearing. In the case we are discussing the inaccuracy was th...

The point is that it reflects those frequencies only under certain light conditions; so the redness of an apple is not an inherent property, it also d...

No, it is red when it appears red. It always has the potential to appear red, but does not always fulfill that potential due to other conditions not o...

Of course, and I asked Andrew if that is what he meant by saying an apple is red and he answered in the negative. In any case if the apple is red only...

What colour it is is how it appears under some specific "normal" conditions; what's the problem with that? No, the apple appears red to the colourblin...

Yes, but one would expect that only if one believed the system to be perfectly accurate at all scales. People, assuming a certain metaphysics, did bel...

As I've already agreed, the common usage of the term 'red' is fine. But what you say here goes to my argument, that there is no identifiable character...

What does it mean to say it is not correct, though? What specific part of it is not correct, as opposed to merely not accurate enough? There is no cer...

The above referring to NM, GR and QM: You don't need to decide between them. They work in different contexts. NM as methodology is not falsified by GR...

I agree with that, and that's perfectly fine in principle, but how rare are such cases; where two scientific theories predict exactly the same things?...

Firstly I did not say that we would see the same X in case they were geological and in case they were artificial, so your first part here is irrelevan...

Do you have any idea at all what a possible answer to that question could look like, or what (observation or logic) could possibly justify it?

The vast bulk of science based on thinking that way is (for all intents and purposes, although not absolutely of course) settled though, so I can't se...

That sounds almost right, although I'd say they are real under any lighting conditions, unless there is not enough light to see any colour at all. So ...

I also have an ontological commitment to colour realism, but it is a commitment to relational realism. I can't see any analyzed way in which it makes ...

You seem to be doubling down, so I'm only going to address this one point which is really the crux of where I think you are going astray. In empirical...

That the apple is not red to some animals implies that it is not red tout court, but that it has the constitutional potential to appear red to some an...

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It seems to me that the idea of zero enables the grasp of orders of magnitude, so I wouldn't see it as "troublesome" but quite the opposite, as preemi...

I agree that only non-categorical statements can be verified by observation. That is because categorical statements are always over-reaching. To say t...

I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't depend on language like....". What doesn't depend? Seeing colours? Or talking about seeing colours? If the form...

Do you mean that under the 'normal' range of light temperature and intensity the constitution of what we call a red apple is such that its surface wil...

Yes, I understand all that; it's pretty elementary, but it isn't addressing the arguments I have made regarding verification being no more more and no...

The main points that you still seem to be resisting seeing is that just as verification or confirmation is not deductively certain, insofar as verific...