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Anything else is word play.

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You have given a reasonable representation of Popper’s position on science. However, Popper’s position is flawed in that it holds you really can’t know anything but that which is demonstrated to be false by testing it. To know the test is failed, you have to KNOW that it has failed. To know that, there is a long logical chain of truths that have to be KNOWN as truths to perform such a test and to know its result.

Popper’s fundamental logical error is the disconnecting of his concepts from their hierarchical connection to reality and using them as floating abstractions. This is otherwise known as an error of a stolen concept.

There is one thing to say that scientific statements must be testable. Its quite another thing to say the only thing you can know is that a test has failed.

In a word, Popper is poppycock!

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Search on the above, and you get the most influential “Philosophy of Science” writer ever.

Quick summary:
Every scientific hypothesis is a statement. To be science, it must have attached a test which could hypothetically disprove it.

The more thoroughly and competently a hypothesis has been so tested without a successful disproof, the more confidence we can have in it. But it is ALWAYS possible that someone will come up with a successful disproof. Then a more inclusive hypothesis will have to be formulated which accommodates the disproof/exception to the previous “law”, and be itself tested as thoroughly and imaginatively and competently as possible.

The result is a body of statements which have not yet been disproven despite best efforts to do so.

No statement which cannot be tested and potentially disproven is scientific.

In a sense, the above amounts to turning a common adage on its head, with qualifiers:

Absence of evidence is not only evidence of absence (of a disproof), it is the ONLY kind of evidence there is — given a thorough and competent attempt to disprove. I.e., there is no such thing as “evidence for”, only a failure to find evidence against. So far.

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Apparently we must address an even more fundamental question.

I don’t see it as any way apparent, nor even vaguely related, but I can’t grind my previous argument on science and experiment into any finer detail so I guess it is one of those “get it or don’t get it” situations.

1. Do you exist?
2. If you say no, end of discussion.
3. If you say yes, what do you mean when you say you exist?

Thanks for that, I’ll say no.

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If the experiment has not been done, its outside of the realm of the inductively non-contradictory.

Tel @ 35: I would argue that only past experimental results can be available… the future results are unknown.

I see, you are not saying the experiment has not been done, you are saying the experiment has not been done now. You presume the result could be randomly different without having a change in conditions. Your position implies that identity and causality do not exist and that stuff just happens.

Then why do science? Especially since science is based, in part, on repeatability. As far as you are concerned, the experiment could be repeated thousands of times all with the same result (within measurement error) but on the very next time, it could be vastly different.

Apparently we must address an even more fundamental question.

1. Do you exist?
2. If you say no, end of discussion.
3. If you say yes, what do you mean when you say you exist?

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Then you hold that if we don’t know everything, we can’t know anything. If so, how can you know even this much? You can’t.

If I make the statement: “Lionell Griffith cannot prove this theorem,” then I can easily prove this is true, because if you did prove the statement then you would be contradicting yourself.

These sort of recursive logical conundrums have been well studied, I might recommend, “Godel Escher Bach – the Golden Braid” as a book that covers this concept from many different angles. However, none of these statements lead to any new knowledge, they merely demonstrate that any abstract mathematical system that is rich enough to contain self-referential statements will also contain incompleteness. In other words, deductive logic on its own will not be sufficient to cover all the possibilities, even in an abstract world.

Deduction is not the only way to logical proof. There is a process of induction that really does work. That is if you stay in contact with reality and progress in your induction without contradiction in any part of your previously validated knowledge. Even the understanding that contradictions cannot exist is grasped by an inductive process applied to all knowledge acquired.

Until the experiment is done, you don’t know whether it will contradict. You make the presumption that all experimental results are available to the inductive process, and I would argue that only past experimental results can be available… the future results are unknown.

Without exception, when a stated proposition fails, it is because it has been extended outside the realm of the inductively non-contradictory.

Well I gave an example of the “tin whiskers”, I’d like you to explain how melting a blob of pure tin and using it to bond two pieces of copper was “outside the realm of the inductively non-contradictory” back around 1950 when it was first tried (as an attempt to reduce the weight of aerospace circuitry). You can’t even reliably grow tin whiskers in a lab today, they are reliably unreliable. You can make a row of seemingly identical bonds and some will whisker, some will not, some will do it a bit later if you wait long enough.

What about the guy who first measured the speed of light and found it was actually constant? People immediately pointed out that such a result would imply that the geometry of the universe was non-Euclidean… up to that day they were sure as sure, then the experiment proved they were wrong. How were they supposed to predict this? How are we now supposed to predict where the next upset will come from?

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