• creativesoul
    11.4k
    Current or future observations refute falsifiable hypotheses.
  • sime
    1k
    Can you show that idea with practical example?Zelebg

    Dark Energy hypotheses in physics are currently the most fashionable example as to why falsification isn't used in practice. Rather than considering the Hubble data of the speed of receding galaxies as refuting General Relativity, Physicists instead 'fix' GR as being true by proposing new and (individually) untestable auxiliary hypotheses so that GR still 'works in combination. In fact, to my understanding Dark energy isn't even at the stage of being a well-defined 'hypothesis'.

    Auxiliary information also includes the trivial and taken-for-granted assumptions that your instrumentation is in 'full working order', that the laws of physics haven't changed since you began the experiment, that you aren't hallucinating, etc. etc. In short, no hypothesis is ever tested in isolation, and the auxiliary assumptions upon which the credibility of experiments rests aren't even exhaustively stateable, let alone formally stateable. Hence the reason why falsification isn't a good model of science or epistemic judgements in general. It's rooted in the archaic notion of logical Atomism - the idea that language has legible denotational semantics where the truth of a proposition stands or falls in isolation of the truth of every other proposition. But this is only true in toy-world scenarios described in an artificial language.
  • Zelebg
    626
    Hence the reason why falsification isn't a good model of science or epistemic judgements in general.

    Alternative? Common auxiliary “side-effect information” inherent in empirical observation is a general problem we have to accept and ignore, what else?

    I’d say dark energy example does not show failure of falsifiability, but astronomy. Also, theories of consciousness, like panpsychism, how is it any more scientific than religion? And what is it that separates hypothesis like religion from scientific ones if not falsifiability?
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Too wordy.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Yep; but apparently this is too brief.
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