> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything
> and hence can explain nothing.
If I'm not mistaken, what you're referring to is the fundamental unknowability of certain things, and this state often causes the mind to hallucinate "facts" like the two above. "It is unknown, therefore it is a fact that anything is possible" is plain bad thinking, but paradoxically it is very popular thinking (thus: proper thinking), even among relatively smart people.
There must be something going on here that can "explain" (in a non-incorrect fashion) all of this, it seems unlikely that we've stumbled upon never before encountered phenomena.
> I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
I too enjoy building simple strawmen and knocking them down:
"Science exists, and "is correct", and I believe in it, therefore my personal opinion of fact is factual in fact".
I wonder which of these two strawmen most closely matches actual conversations that can be found on the internet. I constantly hear stories about religious people saying incredibly silly things (over and above standard silly Normative Cognition), but I rarely ever encounter it in real life. What I describe in my strawman though (essentially: scientism, the ~religion of science, etc), it is extremely common on all social media platforms, ion TV, in the newspaper, etc.
Ok, so I may have checked your comment history. You seem smart! Are you just over-thinking things horrendously? [*]
I'm just trying to talk about Falsifiability. That's the only thing I'm talking about.
If you posit an unfalsifiable ( == untestable) hypothesis, then -unsurprisingly- that hypothesis can't be tested.
Fun for teasing people if you're subtle about it, absolutely! Leaves people really confused until they catch on!
But when troubleshooting or dealing with issues in the real world, it's probably best to stick to testable hypotheses.
I'm not really sure how to explain this any better, it's really basic stuff, so I figure you already know this? (I mean it's basically how you can debug a program or fix a car too. I think Feynman learned it by fixing radios as a teenager, and when he grew up he ended up applying it to quantum mechanics.)
[*] Or - worse yet ;-) - are you a philosophy major?
I ran into indirect realism quite a while ago, I think in neurophysiology or ethology to begin with. (A percept relating to an object is not the object itself).
Not sure why you bring up that and CWA here at this time though. Does it have something to do with falsifiability from your perspective? I think falsifiability is more of an OWA kind of thing though, isn't it? (The idea being that you never have sufficient information to know if something is true, only if it is positively false. That sounds pretty OWA to me, right?)
I'm interested to hear what you mean by "and the consequences" , because I truly have no idea what you might be seeing, and I'm really curious now. I get the impression you see people making certain kinds of mistakes?
In re:
> Otherwise, it's compatible with literally anything and hence can explain nothing.
Feynman restates it from a different angle: he calls these kinds of things vague theories and states that they are not very useful to scientists because they can be hard to prove wrong.
Throughout he gives a bunch of examples of such vague theories that cannot be proven wrong. (eg that moogles did it, or the positions of the planets influenced when to go to the dentist, or maybe it was caused by flying saucers. )
He also points out Newtons laws which are not vague, and thus can and have been proven somewhat wrong since (see also: Einstein) .
I think further down our thread, this is in re whether saying "God did it" (or "A wizard did it" etc ) has Explanatory power:
* Why do the planets move in ellipses: "God did it"
* Why do the tides go in and out: "A wizard did it"
* How fast will an apple hit my head if dropped from precisely 10.25 meters, and will I need to wear a helmet? "Zeus knows the answer"
etc.
I mean, all technically plausible answers (maybe?), but not very useful if you're trying to understand anything. :-P
(ps. The answer to the latter should be about ~14.17 m/s ~= 50.4 km/h . Something you could go out and measure for yourself outdoors if you like! )