Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum - View Single Post - {X} "constitutes a falsification of" {Y}

Ari Jokimaki · #47 (**permalink**) 24-July-2008, 09:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nereid

So, to paraphrase what I wrote in post#13, from what's in this thread (including dgruss23's post quoted here), it seems that "X (observations) constitutes a falsification of (theory/idea) Y" is neither an accurate description of what happens in science nor a useful guide to how to actually do science.

It seems to me that generally falsification should be applied to detailed theories only. I don't see much point in trying to falsify "ideas", because I doubt that "ideas" are usually falsifiable (but sure there might be some ideas that are detailed enough so that they too can be falsifiable). When I think of "idea", I think that we are in more of a philosophical domain than in physical. To say that an idea or concept is falsified because it seems to go against some current observations doesn't have much meaning if the idea or concept is not specified accurately enough to be genuinely falsifiable. With that in mind, I quote couple of things from myself (in another forum about a year and half ago):

Quote:

I don't see the point in rejecting the concepts which might not be falsifiable. Especially in cosmology there is not much we can actually falsify. I think we have to be very careful about falsifiability when we discuss philosophical concepts. Some models of universe might contain philosophical concepts that are not falsifiable, but usually those models also contain physical concepts that are falsifiable, so generally you can falsify a model even if it would contain some unfalsifiable concepts. For example, expansion of space is not falsifiable concept; even if you would show that space doesn't expand somewhere, one could argue that it expands somewhere else, just not there where it was measured.

and:

Quote:

One additional point about falsifiability: when we say that something is not falsifiable, we really mean that we can't falsify that something with our current level of knowledge. But when our level of knowledge increases, so does our ability to falsify things. So, if something doesn't seem falsifiable currently, it might be falsifiable in future, therefore it makes no sense to reject concepts based on falsifiability alone.