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Falsifiability is likely not what strictly necessary or sufficient delineates science from pseudoscience. It's good for some sciences but not others.

janalsncm 2y ago
Falsifiability is a requirement for any scientific hypothesis. I don’t know about pseudoscience but a non-falsifiable hypothesis is not science.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  And what has NOT been falsified, do you then consider that solid science, or just not yet falsified?
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    If it is falsifiable but not falsified, that’s considered a credit to the hypothesis. The strongest of our scientific theories have been tested thousands of times but not falsified.
- naasking 2y ago
  Debatable: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals Popper even thought evolution by natural selection was not falsifiable.
  - naasking 2y ago
    What's interesting was not that he changed his mind, but that he adjusted his own understanding of falsification to accomodate new data rather than letting it falsify his framework. If you keep reading, you that this led to Kuhn's criticism of Popper's approach, and his motion of scientific revolutions, which we see actually being practiced: particle dark matter has technically been falsified many times, but we didn't throw it out but instead revised it to accomodate new data. It is only when these sorts of revisions become less plausible compared to a totally different approach that science meaningfully progresses.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    The next paragraph mentions that he retracted this statement the next year.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      How does science conclusively resolve "is"? It seems to be a function of human opinion based on this.
- mistermann 2y ago
  I wonder if Richard Feynman's mind behaved like this.
abeppu 2y ago
Strictly, I think your first sentence is correct: pseudoscience sometimes does make falsifiable claims. Homeopathy advocates believe that their preparations actually help heal. But for your second sentence, do you have in mind a hypothesis which you think is not testable but is still part of scientific inquiry?
- blackbear_ 2y ago
  > do you have in mind a hypothesis which you think is not testable but is still part of scientific inquiry? Atomism was certainly not testable when it was first proposed by the ancient Greeks, and yet here we are. What is unscientific today could be scientific tomorrow (or in a thousand years). I would argue that figuring out how to (dis)prove something is also part of scientific inquiry.
  - abeppu 2y ago
    It's a good point that whether something is testable changes over time. But, in separating scientific from non-scientific claims, can we not distinguish those that are in some way motivated by some limited available evidence, and which would be testable with some kind of evidence which we can describe how to get in principle (if not practically), from those that don't have any real path towards being falsified? I think roughly that Democritus probably got lucky and was essentially making a philosophical claim, and that we selectively choose to focus on the parts that were eventually found to line up with scientific results. Apparently he also believed that some atoms were hook-shaped and others eye-shaped, and though the specific texts are lost, it's hard to see how he could have arrived at that through "scientific" means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism#Democritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism#Democritus If you wanted to say that something with no path to being testable is "science" because in the long arc of history we can't rule out that it might eventually be testable, then one has to admit a bunch of weird stuff into "science". No one today can guarantee that 2500 years in the future someone won't figure out the technology for inter-dimensional observation, and we'll find that in the next universe up we can listen to God talking to his choir of Angels -- but the absence of such a guarantee doesn't seem like sufficient grounds for someone to say "Abrahamic monotheism is a scientific hypothesis; we just don't have the apparatus to test it out yet."

janalsncm 2y ago

Falsifiability is a requirement for any scientific hypothesis. I don’t know about pseudoscience but a non-falsifiable hypothesis is not science.

robwwilliams 2y ago
And what has NOT been falsified, do you then consider that solid science, or just not yet falsified?
- janalsncm 2y ago
  If it is falsifiable but not falsified, that’s considered a credit to the hypothesis. The strongest of our scientific theories have been tested thousands of times but not falsified.
naasking 2y ago
Debatable: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals Popper even thought evolution by natural selection was not falsifiable.
- naasking 2y ago
  What's interesting was not that he changed his mind, but that he adjusted his own understanding of falsification to accomodate new data rather than letting it falsify his framework. If you keep reading, you that this led to Kuhn's criticism of Popper's approach, and his motion of scientific revolutions, which we see actually being practiced: particle dark matter has technically been falsified many times, but we didn't throw it out but instead revised it to accomodate new data. It is only when these sorts of revisions become less plausible compared to a totally different approach that science meaningfully progresses.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  The next paragraph mentions that he retracted this statement the next year.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    How does science conclusively resolve "is"? It seems to be a function of human opinion based on this.
mistermann 2y ago
I wonder if Richard Feynman's mind behaved like this.

abeppu 2y ago

Strictly, I think your first sentence is correct: pseudoscience sometimes does make falsifiable claims. Homeopathy advocates believe that their preparations actually help heal. But for your second sentence, do you have in mind a hypothesis which you think is not testable but is still part of scientific inquiry?

blackbear_ 2y ago
> do you have in mind a hypothesis which you think is not testable but is still part of scientific inquiry? Atomism was certainly not testable when it was first proposed by the ancient Greeks, and yet here we are. What is unscientific today could be scientific tomorrow (or in a thousand years). I would argue that figuring out how to (dis)prove something is also part of scientific inquiry.
- abeppu 2y ago
  It's a good point that whether something is testable changes over time. But, in separating scientific from non-scientific claims, can we not distinguish those that are in some way motivated by some limited available evidence, and which would be testable with some kind of evidence which we can describe how to get in principle (if not practically), from those that don't have any real path towards being falsified? I think roughly that Democritus probably got lucky and was essentially making a philosophical claim, and that we selectively choose to focus on the parts that were eventually found to line up with scientific results. Apparently he also believed that some atoms were hook-shaped and others eye-shaped, and though the specific texts are lost, it's hard to see how he could have arrived at that through "scientific" means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism#Democritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism#Democritus If you wanted to say that something with no path to being testable is "science" because in the long arc of history we can't rule out that it might eventually be testable, then one has to admit a bunch of weird stuff into "science". No one today can guarantee that 2500 years in the future someone won't figure out the technology for inter-dimensional observation, and we'll find that in the next universe up we can listen to God talking to his choir of Angels -- but the absence of such a guarantee doesn't seem like sufficient grounds for someone to say "Abrahamic monotheism is a scientific hypothesis; we just don't have the apparatus to test it out yet."