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There may be some difficulties with the criterion that you just laid out, one practical and another logical: 1. 'Conceivable experiment' is a changing definiti

There may be some difficulties with the criterion that you just laid out, one practical and another logical: 1. 'Conceivable experiment' is a changing definition, since the realm of what humans can conceive is always expanding with the growth of technology and knowledge. If we had been around 2000+ years ago, would you have considered Democritus's atomic theory to be meaningless, given the lack of any conceivable path to test it at the time? Either you have to take quite an expansive view of what is 'conceivable', or admit that 'meaningless' here refers more to practical difficulties that may be temporary, rather than anything inherent in a particular claim. 2. If we turn your statement back on itself, statements about meaning are also statements about the world (after all, what is 'meaning' if it doesn't involve what humans think and believe?). Is your statement that 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' itself falsifiable? If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it?

whatshisface 7y ago
>would you have considered Democritus's atomic theory to be meaningless, given the lack of any conceivable path to test it at the time? Strictly speaking Democritus's atomic theory is still untestable today because it doesn't include the actual scale of the atoms. For all we know the apparently continuous quantum fields are themselves made of "atoms" (in his sense, not the modern meaning of the word atom). If he had said "things will get clearly atom-y around a nanometer" then it would have been at least conceivable that someone could eventually look that closely. >you have to take quite an expansive view of what is 'conceivable' That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria (and saying that it was a necessary but insufficient condition). >If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it? That's kind of like asking what sort of experiment could disprove the law of the excluded middle: not an unreasonable question, but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. To test my claim, you could iterate though every claim about the universe, checking to see if it simultaneously could not contradict with any observation, and yet predicted what you would observe. Good luck actually doing it; but it does technically meet my criterion.
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  > That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria > but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. Yes, I was trying to illustrate that the line between 'science' and 'metaphysics' is necessarily a blurry one, and the choice of (and justification for) where to draw it itself lies in the realm of metaphysics. The broader the universe of claims you admit as scientific, the more 'testability' and 'falsifiability' lie closer to the realm of theory. However, even theories (and paradigms) that can't be directly placed on the experimenter's bench today can point towards fruitful lines of investigation. On the flip side, we can't but to make metaphysical (and therefore non-scientific) claims and hold them as true, despite our best efforts ... the strong version of 'scientism' (that only scientific claims can have meaning) is a self-defeating one.
klyrs 7y ago
> Is your statement that 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' itself falsifiable? If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it? As a mathematician, I've always looked on this issue with some bemusement. Physicists are particularly egregious in their abuse of mathematical notation, yet get very fussy about what constitutes "proof." If we consider a result measured to "five nines" of uncertainty -- scratch that -- if we consider a million results measured to "five nines" of uncertainty, than we're almost certain to have "proved" a falsehood. And that's assuming that everybody is using complete models with no missing variables (protip: they're not). And then they turn around and heap scorn on "soft sciences" which deign to apply scientific methodology to systems too small, and far too complicated for such simplistic modeling, where experimentalists jump through extraordinary hoops to avoid ethical disasters. The need for falsifiability is a strongly-held opinion. And don't get me wrong, it's a great rule of thumb. From a mathematical basis, I can take a stab at your question. If you have a million data points, you can find a million-degree polynomial to fit it. If you're allowed to adjust the polynomial every time we make a new observation, it's unfalsifiable. However, that approach is rightly seen as problematic because the predictive power (that is, meaningfulness) is zero. But of course, this is only an existence proof (aka, an anecdote), that some unfalsifiable theories are meaningless. It doesn't prove that all unfalsifiable theories are meaningless.
mannykannot 7y ago
Democritus might have said that his theory was falsifiable in principle, as there were different theories being proposed by others. All of those theories, however (Democritus' included) lacked any empirical evidence for or against them, so they were all metaphysical speculation, not science (a claim that has been made about some aspects of fundamental physics today.) I agree, however, that it was not meaningless - that should be reserved for ideas that are unfalsifiable in principle, such as p-zombies With regard to point 2, if 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' is not falsifiable, then it might indicate that it is not a scientific theory -- but no surprise there, as it is just a personal opinion, as is whether or not you agree with Popper. As it happens, I think it is falsifiable, in general - mathematical identities are not falsifiable, if you include the relevant axioms, and they are not meaningless. It's pretty clear, however, that whatshisface's comment was intended in the context of science.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >mathematical identities are not falsifiable Math papers say, "If you follow these induction rules from these definitions and axioms you will arrive at these results." That's falsifiable, in fact it is found to be false every now and then.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    But is that a falsifiable claim about a proposition, or the identity itself (in those cases where the claim is not false)? The Platonist in me suspects that these are different things, though I could probably be induced to change my mind by a persuasive counter-argument.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      The Platonist idea that mathematical statements correspond to something "out there" in metaphysical space is a great example of an idea that's not falsifiable. However that's not an idea that I would consider part of mathematics.

whatshisface 7y ago

>would you have considered Democritus's atomic theory to be meaningless, given the lack of any conceivable path to test it at the time? Strictly speaking Democritus's atomic theory is still untestable today because it doesn't include the actual scale of the atoms. For all we know the apparently continuous quantum fields are themselves made of "atoms" (in his sense, not the modern meaning of the word atom). If he had said "things will get clearly atom-y around a nanometer" then it would have been at least conceivable that someone could eventually look that closely. >you have to take quite an expansive view of what is 'conceivable' That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria (and saying that it was a necessary but insufficient condition). >If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it? That's kind of like asking what sort of experiment could disprove the law of the excluded middle: not an unreasonable question, but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. To test my claim, you could iterate though every claim about the universe, checking to see if it simultaneously could not contradict with any observation, and yet predicted what you would observe. Good luck actually doing it; but it does technically meet my criterion.

smallnamespace 7y ago
> That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria > but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. Yes, I was trying to illustrate that the line between 'science' and 'metaphysics' is necessarily a blurry one, and the choice of (and justification for) where to draw it itself lies in the realm of metaphysics. The broader the universe of claims you admit as scientific, the more 'testability' and 'falsifiability' lie closer to the realm of theory. However, even theories (and paradigms) that can't be directly placed on the experimenter's bench today can point towards fruitful lines of investigation. On the flip side, we can't but to make metaphysical (and therefore non-scientific) claims and hold them as true, despite our best efforts ... the strong version of 'scientism' (that only scientific claims can have meaning) is a self-defeating one.

klyrs 7y ago

> Is your statement that 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' itself falsifiable? If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it? As a mathematician, I've always looked on this issue with some bemusement. Physicists are particularly egregious in their abuse of mathematical notation, yet get very fussy about what constitutes "proof." If we consider a result measured to "five nines" of uncertainty -- scratch that -- if we consider a million results measured to "five nines" of uncertainty, than we're almost certain to have "proved" a falsehood. And that's assuming that everybody is using complete models with no missing variables (protip: they're not). And then they turn around and heap scorn on "soft sciences" which deign to apply scientific methodology to systems too small, and far too complicated for such simplistic modeling, where experimentalists jump through extraordinary hoops to avoid ethical disasters. The need for falsifiability is a strongly-held opinion. And don't get me wrong, it's a great rule of thumb. From a mathematical basis, I can take a stab at your question. If you have a million data points, you can find a million-degree polynomial to fit it. If you're allowed to adjust the polynomial every time we make a new observation, it's unfalsifiable. However, that approach is rightly seen as problematic because the predictive power (that is, meaningfulness) is zero. But of course, this is only an existence proof (aka, an anecdote), that some unfalsifiable theories are meaningless. It doesn't prove that all unfalsifiable theories are meaningless.

mannykannot 7y ago

Democritus might have said that his theory was falsifiable in principle, as there were different theories being proposed by others. All of those theories, however (Democritus' included) lacked any empirical evidence for or against them, so they were all metaphysical speculation, not science (a claim that has been made about some aspects of fundamental physics today.) I agree, however, that it was not meaningless - that should be reserved for ideas that are unfalsifiable in principle, such as p-zombies With regard to point 2, if 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' is not falsifiable, then it might indicate that it is not a scientific theory -- but no surprise there, as it is just a personal opinion, as is whether or not you agree with Popper. As it happens, I think it is falsifiable, in general - mathematical identities are not falsifiable, if you include the relevant axioms, and they are not meaningless. It's pretty clear, however, that whatshisface's comment was intended in the context of science.

whatshisface 7y ago
>mathematical identities are not falsifiable Math papers say, "If you follow these induction rules from these definitions and axioms you will arrive at these results." That's falsifiable, in fact it is found to be false every now and then.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  But is that a falsifiable claim about a proposition, or the identity itself (in those cases where the claim is not false)? The Platonist in me suspects that these are different things, though I could probably be induced to change my mind by a persuasive counter-argument.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The Platonist idea that mathematical statements correspond to something "out there" in metaphysical space is a great example of an idea that's not falsifiable. However that's not an idea that I would consider part of mathematics.