Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8272409" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Isn't that an indisputable truth, then? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60f.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":sneaky:" title="Sneaky    :sneaky:"  data-smilie="21"data-shortname=":sneaky:" />Falsifiability is pretty weak, actually. The Duhem-Quine thesis, for example, may not be a fatal flaw, but it's a pretty bad one. There's also the issue of falsifiability depending on the scientific community being able to achieve consensus on what counts as falsifying evidence. The two of them together isn't good.Then there's the issue of falsifiability not actually looking like how people do science in several different ways. Scientists often cling to theories because they have desirable properties and only "defect" to a new theory when the old one has become totally untenable; scientists often conduct science without the goal of testing for any particular thing, and only derive testable claims after; scientists almost always use either frequentist or Bayesian understanding of probability, which is (explicitly) incompatible with Popper's perspective (because falsificationism explicitly rejects any concept of corroboration, but both frequentist and Bayesian probability interpretations are about our confidence that the available evidence supports a particular belief). As a practical description of how "good science" is done, falsificationism has generally failed, and despite its superficial popularity among scientists (many of whom have no idea this concept has a name, let alone that Popper was so influential to it), serious scientists usually don't make their choices about hypotheses, evidence, experimental design, or evidence analysis in ways that are compatible with falsification of any kind.And note, I say all of this as someone whose primary area of study IS physics. I just also studied philosophy because I love both things. (I am of course nowhere near as much of an expert as other people in the thread.)Finally, with all that said...I'm really not sure how we got onto this really seriously divergent tangent? Because this doesn't have the slightest thing to do with what we were talking about just a page ago, which is whether telling lies is harmful to anyone.You seem to be committed to a pretty hard version of relativism: that ethical statements (and, based on other stuff you've said, potentially all statements...) can only be said to have any meaning relative to a specific context and, as a result, no action can ever be called "wrong" in any context-free sense. A thesis that is...not going to go over well with most non-relativists, who tend to hold there are at least a few things that are either actually true (moral realism) or in some other way universal even if not facts in the proper sense (e.g. sentimentalism).</blockquote>

Verification