There are gorillas in Africa - non-falsifiable?

Factual Questions
1

In trying to explain the concept of falsification in science I keep running into my own lack of expertise in the philosophy of science and when looking for answers online I confuse myself.

I grasp that a falsifiable statement is something that can be proven false by some observation or experiment.

I find the available examples of non-falsifiable statements lacking or confusing. For instance one explanation uses cryptozoology and a statement such as “There is a large animal in Loch Ness” as an example of a non-falsifiable statement. Although we could drain the entire lake and be reasonably sure, this is not practical. But then “There are gorillas in Africa” becomes unscientific as well.

Of course there is much better supporting evidence for the existence of gorillas in Africa than for the Loch Ness monster, but the concept of falsification seems to me to say that that is insufficient. Einstein’s theory of relativity is scientific because it is falsifiable, not because experiments support it.

So either the statement “There is a Loch Ness monster” is falsifiable or I’m missing some important point (or my gorilla example is falsifiable in some way the Loch Ness monster example isn’t), in either case I need some education on falsification and have high hopes for gaining it from this board. :wink:

2

“There are Gorillas in Africa” and “There is a large animal in Loch Ness” are both falsifiable. Being practical to drain the Loch, or to, I suppose, clear-cut Africa and send in 10 million simultaneous observers to verify there are no Gorillas, has nothing to do with whether the statements are falsifiable.

3

“There are NO gorillas in Africa” is easy to falsify. All we need is one gorilla.

4

The classic example is ‘All swans are white.’

5

Evidence can be taken as bypassing falsifiability.
There is evidence of gorillas in Africa, therefore “that there are no gorillas in africa” is obviously falsifiable - just use the evidence.
Falsifiability is more about constructions , something for which no evidence exists.
If you cannot devise a way to get the evidence, can anybody ? Why wasn’t the way to collect the evidence proposed with the idea?

6

So are there any examples of non-falsifiable statements or hypotheses that aren’t either so complex you need to be an expert to understand it or contrived like the invisible pink unicorn in my garage?

7

“There is a god” comes to mind as an obvious, and well-discussed by generations of theologians and philosophers, example.

8

Whoever gave “There is a large animal in Loch Ness,” as an example of an unfalsifiable statement is mistaken. It is perfectly falsifiable (at least, assuming that the statement is clarified by providing some reasonably objective definition of “large”). The practicalities of draining the lake have nothing to do with it. It can be falsified in principle, given enough effort and money. Thus, by falsificationist criteria, it is a scientific claim. That is not to say that it is a true claim. Falsificationism is not concerned with what is true or false, but with what is scientific or unscientific, and is happy to acknowledge both that most scientific claims either have turned out to be false, or are likely to do so, and that many unscientific (unfalsifiable) claims may actually be true. “I like chocolate,” is, arguably, unfalsifiable (even if I never eat chocolate, perhaps because I think it is bad for me, I might still like it), and thus not a part of science, but it is, very plausibly, true

“There are gorillas in Africa,” could, likewise, be falsified, in principle, by an exhaustive search of Africa that found no gorillas, so it is scientific in the relevant sense. However, by the same token, “There are gorillas in Antarctica,” is equally falsifiable and thus scientific, even though it is (I presume) false.

It is probably also worth pointing out that “There is a large animal in Loch Ness,” is a poor example in another way too. Falsificationist philosophers of science are mainly concerned with whether universalizing theories, hypotheses or generalizations are scientific or not, that is statements that are supposed to hold true anywhere in the universe at any time. “There is a large animal in Loch Ness,” and “There are gorillas in Africa,” are not statements of this sort, because they apply only to specific regions (and, implicitly, specific time periods). “Gorillas are only to be found in Africa,” (or, more plausibly, “Gorillas living in the wild are only to be found in Africa,”) is an example of such a universal generalization, and it could be falsified by finding evidence (either current of fossil) of wild gorillas living elsewhere, so it probably does counts as a scientific hypothesis according to falsificationists. By contrast, such evidence would not falsify “There are gorillas in Africa,” which says nothing about whether or not gorillas are to be found elsewhere.

None of the above should be taken as an endorsement, by me, of falsificationism as a philosophy of science.

9

I think you are confusing falsifiability with reasonableness and research. Falsifiability is not concerned with what is reasonable; it is a logic concept. Your exhaustive search might overlook some gorillas. Perhaps it wasn’t all that exhaustive. Perhaps they were hiding in caves. Perhaps, when you were hunting in Chad, they were in Mozambique, and when you were hunting in Mozambique, they were vacationing in Chad.

Similarly, there might be white gorillas that are hard to see. They might be underground. They might be touring Tierra del Fuego that month. No matter how exhaustive or thorough your search or how implausible your biological experience suggests, you have not falsified your statement.

In contrast, “There are NO gorillas in Africa” is falsifiable with the finding of ONE SINGLE gorilla. No need to find two, three, or a buttload, and no need to continue searching throughout all of Africa if you find one gorilla in one obscure corner of the continent right away (I’ll send you my uncle’s phone number to make it quick). It is also true of a similar statement about Antarctica. That’s what falsifiability is.

10

No, it is you who confusing falsifiability with reasonableness. Falsifiability (as it used a criterion of being scientific) means falsifiable in principle, and it can include things that are very difficult to do in practice. Indeed, in real science that is very often the case. Have you heard of the large hadron collider? Probably more money and effort went into that than would have to go into a truly exhaustive search of Africa, with a line of researchers all keeping in sight of one another, stretching across the continent and slowly moving from one end to the next.

And what you definitely do not get to do is posit things like tiny gorillas or ones that (unlike normal gorillas) hide in caves or take vacations in Tierra Del Fuego, or white ones that you can’t see. It is precisely moves like that that (according to Popper) make something pseudoscience rather than science. You define your terms beforehand.

11

There is intelligent life in the universe cannot be falsified. There is no intelligent life the universe is falsifiable. (I will except what is found on the earth, although some would argue otherwise.) Most interesting, mathematical statements are unfalsifiable since they are tautologies.

“All swans are white” is eminently falsifiable as I realized the first time I saw a black swan. Unless of course, you modify the definition of swan so as to include whiteness, in which case the claim becomes a tautology.

12

That’s just fighting the hypothetical. If it wasn’t exhaustive, then…it wasn’t exhaustive. If it was exhaustive, and didn’t turn up any gorillas, then the claim has been falsified.

Once you start making excuses – “Maybe they were hiding in caves” – you start down the path to the invisible pink unicorn. “Maybe they were invisible. Maybe they are always behind you, no matter which way you face. Maybe they’re spiritual.” These ideas entail changing the definition that, until that point, we had mutually agreed upon.

13

[hijack]

I don’t think even today that we could actually drain Loch Ness. Even if they discovered a giant alien spaceship at the bottom of it, it’s an enormous volume of water.

From Wiki:**
Loch Ness is the second largest Scottish loch by surface area at 56.4 km2 (21.8 sq mi) after Loch Lomond, but due to its great depth, it is the largest by volume. Its deepest point is 230 m (755 ft), deeper than the height of London’s BT Tower at 189 m (620 ft) and deeper than any other loch except Loch Morar. It contains more fresh water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined…**

IMO it would require a feat of engineering greater than building the Panama Canal.

14

Maybe we could freeze it solid! Then just excavate the ice! Yeah! That’d work!

15

Divert the rivers feeding it. Wait until water evaporate. Done. :wink:

16

To quote a guesting Australian: “Hey, mates! The swans here are white!”

17

The largest pumped storage station in the world according to wikipedia, Bath County Pumped Storage Station, could empty the loch in 190 days if my calculations are correct. You’d need to build your pump on a floating platform and take into account water flowing in, but it doesn’t look like a Panama Canal endevour.

18

With a quick thought, maybe the way to think about the difference between strict logical proof (a good concept to know) and scientific proof (also a good concept, but different).
By strict logic, you really can’t prove there are no gorillas in Antarctica; they might be albinos hiding in snow caves, a blizzard could have hit right when you were searching the one place they live, etc. Which is contrasted with the strict logical truth that finding one gorilla is sufficient to prove that there are gorillas in Antarctica.

But science isn’t really usually concerned with strict logical proof, but rather the weight of evidence. And “There is a reproducing population of gorillas in Antarctica’” is a statement you can give evidence against. For instance we don’t know of any food for a population of gorillas in Antarctica, and we have good reason to think that there’s no hidden food sources; the temperatures that we know of everywhere in Antartica are not suitable for gorilla survival, and we have good reason to think that there’s no unknown warm oases, etc. It is a scientifically testable statement because it depends on or implies things that we can check (to a reasonable degree of certainty). Note that I changed what we’re trying to disprove very slightly so we can not argue about a single gorilla accidentally shipped to a research station or something like that.

On the other hand, “There are invisible space monkeys” is kind of hard to give evidence against. Any evidence can be countered by saying “Invisible Space Monkeys don’t need to eat plants” or “Invisible Space Monkeys can survive in a vacuum” or whatever. As long as anything can be explained away, then it’s not a scientific statement.

19

You couldn’t just divert them, they’ll inevitably follow the lowest point in the water table and wind up in the loch anyway. You’d have to dam them. Which would be both a huge construction project in terms of building dams, and dealing with the areas behind them that would get flooded.

That place is merely pumping water between two reservoirs right beside each other. To empty a huge body of water like Ness you’d have to pump the water thru miles & miles of pipes to an area up, over & outside of the loch’s drainage basin. Would take a lot more energy than just pumping between reservoirs. Could possible be done, but like I said it would be a massive project (you’d have to do both, dam the rivers and pump out all the water).

20

You cannot devise a plan, even hypothetical, to search Africa which would be sufficient to claim there are certainly no gorillas (or space ships, or unicorns) in Africa. The claim is unfalsifiable. No matter how many people you use, how much money you spend, or how you plan the search party, you simply can not even in theory rule out every possible condition which could make that statement false. There are an infinite number of ways in which the statement “there are gorillas in Africa” could be true.

“There are no gorillas in Africa” is falsifiable. For what it’s worth, “Thor, the god of thunder, lives in Milwaukee and plays the accordion on Thursdays” is not falsifiable either. “Thor, the god of thunder, does not exist” actually is falsifiable. All that means is that there is a hypothetical discovery which could prove the statement false.