Aren’t you assuming something about all sunflowers in concluding that what you are observing is a sunflower?
So, should we just throw up our hands and give up? And if so, does that mean that those assertions are wrong, or simply that you aren’t interested in discussing them?
Nah. Maybe scientific debates. There are plenty of philosophical debates that don’t involve the necessity of perfect knowledge.
Agreed. As a matter of fact, tests conducted on Special Relativity, for example, did not confirm the theory to be true. The theory was true the moment Einstein drew his final deductive inference.
Huh? The theory may have been true in a syntactic deductive sense, but as far as anyone knowing or believing it was true, there was considerable heavy lifting to be done. Deduction is only as sound as your set of premises allow it to be, and in the * real * world, you have a couple of problems:
a. You don’t know that your premises are sound.
b. You don’t know that they are complete.
From your very own citation regarding Karl Popper:
"With Einstein’s theory the situation was strikingly different. Take one typical instance — Einstein’s prediction, just then confirmed by the finding of Eddington’s expedition. Einstein’s gravitational theory had led to the result that light must be attracted by heavy bodies (such as the sun), precisely as material bodies were attracted. As a consequence it could be calculated that light from a distant fixed star whose apparent position was close to the sun would reach the earth from such a direction that the star would seem to be slightly shifted away from the sun; or, in other words, that stars close to the sun would look as if they had moved a little away from the sun, and from one another. "
(That’s assuming you can actually speak of a theory as “true” which I’ve always heard was sort of frowned on. I thought the nicest thing you can say about a theory is that it has predictive power and doesn’t conflict with any known observations.)
Popper’s concern was not about whether a theory was true, but whether it was scientific. The point I’ve been trying to make with you for the past three days is that those two things — true and scientific — are not synonyms.
As for Einstein’s premises, he used two: (1) the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, and (2) physical law is the same everywhere in the universe. Note that you cannot test either of these scientifically — you would have to monitor the entire continuum of spacetime.
Finally, it might be of interest to note that falsification (Popper’s identifying tag for science versus pseudoscience) is itself an analytic (like truth) and therefore is itself not falsifiable. So, the entire validity of science rests on an analytic axiom.
Scientists no longer believe that something has to be falsifiable to be scientific – at least according to Wikipedia.
Be careful with Wikipedia, cricetus. Robert McHenry, former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened the “faith-based encyclopedia” to a public toilet: you’re never sure who used it last. It’s fine as a source to summarise what can be found in other sources, but beware of claiming it as an authority in itself.
In this case, the strict falsifiable=scientific criterion is sometimes relaxed in the case of new theories which are based on old ones which have withstood rigorous testing (“true beyond reasonable doubt”, or “not shown false even despite tests which were almost impossible to pass” perhaps) but are such that the falsifiable consequences are not yet apparent, or the tests are not yet technologically possible. Thus the term protoscience is often used to distinguish it from pseudoscience.
Sentient, since you’re here (and thank you for stopping in, by the way), would you mind explaining exactly why falsifiability is so critical to empirical tests? Your expository skills are much better than mine, and I can’t seem to get across the point that science predicts but does not predicate.
It seems that the term “empirical proof” is the bee in this particular bonnet. You are using the word “proof” in the strict mathematical or analytical sense, Fin is using it as in the phrase “proof beyond reasonable doubt”, ie. the standard of the ‘statistical’ evidence one sees in a court of law. I’m loathe to step into such semantics, really.
Scientists, whoever they are, set forth linguistic propositions having varying possible correlations to somehow-sensed data: this is, IMO, the nature of “truth” and “falsity”. If (for whatever reason) no such correlation can be made, the liguistic proposition is tagged by the label “unscientific” according to a chap called “Karl”. Even if such a correlation is possible, we can only trust that our correlation modules are working correctly and that the same correlation result will be returned in future: thus, there is no absolute “truth”. Empiricism is about observations (from whatever sensory input). Truth is about the correlation between the observation and the linguistic sentence you set up: it is not the observations themselves.
This is a debate I’d prefer to set up myself rather than jump into someone else’s - I could find stuff me and Fin disagree on (and I wholeheartedly agree with Lib’s OP, despite understanding the gist of what “you can’t prove a negative” is supposed to mean), and I could debate Lib on some issues (I think defining science solely as a methodology is overly restrictive: when I speak of cognitive science or materials science I mean not just the methods but the body of working conclusions derived thereby. I think that “science’s answers” or “a scientific fact” are useful shorthand for what has been tested rigorously compared to what hasn’t, despite me not going as far as allowing “absolute scientific truth” or the like.)
I will now pick the fence-splinters from my behind. 
Sentient Meat, as long as you’re willing to act as an intepreter between our separate universes, can you please explain what Liberal meant by
“Agreed. As a matter of fact, tests conducted on Special Relativity, for example, did not confirm the theory to be true. The theory was true the moment Einstein drew his final deductive inference.”
This makes no sense to me in a number of ways. The first, of course, is that we don’t actually consider any theory to be “true”. I * think * that Liberal is using the term “true” in the sense of “logically sound”. But he might also be using “true” in the sense of some Platonic ideal of truth – I dunno.
I’d like to know why the theory of Special Relativity was true “the moment Einstein drew his final deductive inference” while, for example, the Phlogiston theory was not.
Yes. Given the truth of the two premises, Einstein’s mathematical treatise yielded such conclusions as E=mc[sup]2[/sup] (equivalence of mass and energy) and t1= t0/(1-v[sup]2[/sup]/c[sup]2[/sup]) (time dilation), which were true if the premises were true given the logical validity of Einstein’s mathematical manipulations.
Just to clear up a nitpick, Eddington’s observations pertained to the consequences of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which incorporated further premises regarding gravity in addition to the two of special. But ultimately, what those observation did was simply provide evidential support for the truth of those original premises, rather than the “truth” of Einstein’s manipulations thereof.
Put simply, his conclusions couldn’t have been false, but they could have demonstrated a situation in which the original premises were false, in which case the logical consequences of some other premises (eg. the existence of phlogistons) might have been explored.
Sory, to clarify, Einsteins conclusions were logically valid. Their logical soundness depended on the truth of the original premises. Eddington’s observations provided an extremely rigorous test of those original premises, which they came through against all odds: they could still not be said to be true, but they were not false despite an incredibly difficult test.
say, “That’s a negative and therefore cannot be proven.”
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” — Arthur Eddington
One can prove anything, depending upon one’s axioms. Statements regarding what can and cannot be proven (outside of a rigorously structured debate) should always be understood as a short-hand for making an epistemological generalization.
An epistemological generalization, of course, is pretty much useless as proposition in a rigorous debate, but they can be useful when in a conversational exchange.
So, I agree wiht the OP. It is quite trivial to prove a negative given the right negative and an appropriate system. But I also feel inclined to give the Buckaroo Bonzai response: “So what? Big deal.”
Spiritus Mundi!
[…happy dance…]
How have you been? I have mentioned you often, and have missed you sorely.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
–Donald Rumsfeld
Lib (A new nick? You can’t disguise that inimitable style.)
I’ve been better; I’ve been worse; but mostly I’ve been insanely busy. I missed this place, but I had to scale back my time to necessities for a while.
Thanks for the wam welcome.
(since I’m Queen of typos, I won’t make a joke here)
funny - I just saw your name and was all thrilled o see you again, too. HI!!!
Back at ya. (and I wouldn’t really be back if I didn’t sprinkle in a few typos.)
& weren’t you kind to ignore mine? 