Like or Dislike: 0  0

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Anything else is word play.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

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!

Like or Dislike: 1  0

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.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

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.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

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?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

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?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

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. Apparently you believe all we can do is guess and be lucky once in a while. You conclude that whatever it is we think we can rely on, can change without notice and without connection to any principle of reality such as the law of identity. I strongly disagree.

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.

You are accepting the Kantian notion that there is an analytic synthetic dichotomy: if it can be proven, it cannot be ab out reality and if it is about reality, it cannot be proven. The error you make is that you disconnect your concepts from reality. Even your so called analytic conclusions have at their root, perception of reality and an inductive process that leads to a grasp of the fundamental principles that support them.

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

Unfortunately, a discussion of correct induction is beyond the scope of a blog. Especially the solution to the problem of universals. The most I can do in such a context is offer the sketch given above.

The basic question to answer is “What do we know and how do we know it?” The existence of modern technological civilization stands or falls on the answer to that question. You say we can’t really know anything. I say we can and the fact of the industrial revolution proves it.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Are we real existent beings of a specific nature, living in a universe of a specific nature, and having a specific means by which we know what we know? Or, are we to pretend we are Gods with infinite knowledge gained without process and able to judge our meager efforts as wanting?

Some people like to pretend the latter is true and will assert they KNOW for CERTAIN that we cannot really know anything for certain.

This is mere rhetorical trickery.

Let’s suppose that (by your argument) there was something that we knew for certain… but we have no way of knowing which of the many things we think we know is the one thing we know for certain. Then then the effect would be identical to not knowing for certain.

Your argument works equally well in reverse… because by proving that we cannot be uncertain about everything you equally prove that we can be certain about some things, up to and including our own inability to fully comprehend the physical world (and your plea to human limitations only supports our inability to be certain).

Your argument about context proves nothing either, because it provides no guaranteed safe mechanism to define the boundaries of this “context” of yours. If by chance, perpetual motion was discovered then the free energy so created could be converted into an additional component added to any equation of any part of physics that we care to name (since our current theory supports the idea that energy is arbitrarily convertible into many forms). We would need to revisit the “context” of our entire body of theory. This is one of the reasons why we can be confident (but not sure) that perpetual motion will not be discovered even in new and unexplored places well beyond the context of any experiment yet performed.

Proof (in the absolute sense) requires logical deduction. That is, to start from axioms, and synthesise more complex implications of these axioms. Within the abstract world of any particular mathematical construct we can have proof. This type of proof can be useful as it leads to a convenient toolbox from which to build our theories (for example Newton’s calculus, Gauss’ solution to linear matrix equations, and the like). We can be certain about this type of proof… but these are not part of the physical world, they are abstract.

For example, in the abstract and strictly-defined world of Euclidean geometry, the theorem of Pythagoras is as true today and for all time as it was when first invented. Neither human, nor alien nor anyone posing as God will find a counter example. No experiment can disprove Pythagoras, because experiments are not part of that abstract Euclidean world.

Physical theories depend on inference. That is to say that the full picture is always incomplete, and we have no axioms given to us. Inference is not deduction. Inference can find answers that deduction cannot find, but inference can also find wrong answers.

The best you can say for inference is that some body of evidence supports the inference, and no counter example has yet been found. If you have an error tolerance, you can say that the inference fits the available measurement within some given tolerance. You could call that “context” if you will, but the new experiment may prove there is a freak situation bang in the middle of the region that you believed was well understood — and your context is blown out of the water. The first people who found their circuits destroyed by “tin whiskers” were caught completely unaware, and to this day we have no theory that explains this phenomena. At the time (which was mid 20th century) it was thought that the metallurgy of tin was very well understood (humans have been working tin and tin alloys for longer than recorded history).

Like or Dislike: 0  0