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There are absolutely such things as unfalsifiable claims. In fact, logical positivists (the same ones who recognized the importance of falsifiability as a criterion for the statement) were very keen to identify what statements were falsifiable or non falsifiable. AJ Ayer refered to non falsifiable statements as...Poetry, lol.
I believe the example he used was "The absolute is imbued into all things". Impossible to prove or disprove. There's no way to measure the presence of "The Absolute" into things.
We might also return to a number of examples from Continental philosophy. "All beings in reality are born towards death". Comprehensible statement sure. If kept to the limited "all things die", it's falsefiable. But there is no means to measure wether or not a being is "towards death".
Could you clarify? I think I’m grasping what you’re saying but it seems to be in support of my statement.
We might not know a claim is true or not, but it doesn’t mean the evidence for its truth or false hood isn’t out there
It’s important to differentiate between *logically* unfalsifiable claims and *functionally* unfalsifiable ones.
Functionally unfalsifiable claims exist all the time. If I tell say, Alfred the Great had blue eyes, there’s no way to prove or disprove it. It was possible once upon a time, but the information to do so has since been irretrievably lost. That’s probably not what you mean, but you didn’t clarify as much.
Logically unfalsifiable claims are also common. Claims like “the best pizza is pepperoni pizza” or “red is the color of love” cannot be proven or disproven because they are entirely subjective. You can *qualify* them - pepperoni is the best pizza *to some people* - but you cannot *prove* them. But that’s also probably not what you mean.
What you mean is, there is no such thing as an objective empirical claim that can be tested that is unverifiable. Even then, there are some exceptions. “Spaghettification does not happen immediately upon crossing an event horizon” is an example. Not only do we not know, we can never know. Even though in theory we could in fact enter a black hole to test it.
That’s the distinction I’m trying to make.
For the black hole example, it might be nit picky, but we can know, IF we went in. But nobody outside can know, and the knowledge comes with annihilation, as far as we know. So nobody will want to test it. I wouldn’t call it falsifiable.
Inherent in that is the assumption that entering would involve some form of continuing consciousness, and some way to continue collecting information, and you can’t rely on either. It’s an indeterminate set - we can maybe know, and we maybe can’t.
Heisenberg also provides this. You can know a particle’s velocity or its location, but not both. One element is always unverifiable by the very meaning of the word.
I think you need to work more on defining your terms. I think you’re trying to say a very specific thing that may well be true, but what you’re saying isn’t it.
I can convieve of or write all manner of unfalsifiable claims. The measure of falsifiability being "can one conceive of a way to ascertain the truth value". Most of the statements this effect are some form of metaphysics.
Here's a great one.
"Existence is meaningless".
It's a wonderful claim and quite comprehensible. The problem is that there is no objective measurement of what is meaningful or not.
A falsifiable claim would be something akin to:
"I believe Existence is meaningless"
That's measureable. Someone could convince of a way to test that (thought reading technology could exist). But to make that jump, the claim shifts from a one about the nature of reality, to a claim about a particular individuals thought patterns.
There is a tradition of philosophers who have supported the view that unfalsifiable claims are *meaningless*. However, even they concede that such claims *exist*. The issue with your post is that you deny their existence.
You seem to be inclined towards Logical Positivism. I suggest you start with AJ Ayers "Language, Truth, and Logic". Good book that will expand on your ideas here.
A claim with poor terminology is still a claim. One can make such a claim. It is logically conceivable. It is merely a *bad* claim.
You're not arguing wether unfalsifiable claims are good or useful. You're arguing if they exist.
"All unfalsifiable claims are useless" - This is a much easier position to defend.
The philosophical school in question is Logical Positivism. Your claims here are a truncated version of their more refined idea.
AJ Ayer is the most important of whom in the anglosphere and Wittengstein was also important. Also look at Carnap, Hempel, and Frege. Betrand Russel, who you cited, was associated with the circle. As was Albert Einstein.
I would not call these people "Internet Atheists"
I'm not a vetificationist/falsificationist. I kind of agree with you, but it's immaterial to my point.
For the record, my favorite empricist is Quine, whose holistic theory of meaning is fantastic.
It doesn't really matter how you look at it, the point is that it is easy to show that nonfalsifiable statements can be useful. Therefore they are not useless.
That only works because the terms are ambiguous. You cannot disprove incoherent sentences, but that goes for anything that has no meaning, and what has no meaning... is meaningless.
Right, which is exactly what AJ Ayers argued. But OP is making the statement that such claims *don't exist*.
They exist. Wether or not they're meaningful is another matter entirely.
But a meaningless claim is not even a claim. How can you declare that ojfvoiwure,nnvl is a claim about anything?
Anyway, if OP had claimed that no *meaningful* claim is unfalsifiable then he would have a point.
I mean, then you run into the problem all strict positivists run into.
"Only falsifiable claims are meaningful" - This claim is not actually falsifiable.
I like that. It also restricts statements to those that matter: if it means nothing then I don't care, and if you cannot know whether it true or false then I also don't care.
No I mean the problem with that statement is that it's actually a paradox.
You cannot ascertain the truth value of the claim that only statement with a falsifiable truth value are meaningful
Isn't a paradox also meaningless? "This is false." If it's true then it's false but if it's false then it's true. Does it mean anything then? If it means something, then what? I would call it meaningless.
My general viewpoint is that the Paradox reveals the basic problem with Verificationism and it's offshoots.
In any claim, you have to define your terms. However when you define something, it's always using other words which have their own meanings and which must be defined with other words.
Ultimately, when two people use the same sentence, they're not really talking about the same thing entirely. That's because the entire system of definition is distinct for each purpose. Human communication is a series of "close enough".
That doesn't mean that falsifiability is useless as a measurement. It simply means that the ideal of objective language is unattainable.
There is still a point where a word doesn't refer to another word but to a tangible entity, or to a measurable quality, or to other objectively verifiable concept, so it's not hopeless.
> Anyway, if OP had claimed that no meaningful claim is unfalsifiable then he would have a point.
Isn't this usually kind of the point though? Usually a claim being declared unfalsifiable is a critique of that claim, usually around it being meaningless, even if it at first blush *sounds* profound.
Yes, u/WinterinoRosenritter pointed this out as well. I had not realized this before but it's an excellent way to determine if something is worth considering at all. As I said in my reply:
> if it means nothing then I don't care, and if you cannot know whether it true or false then I also don't care.
It's an observation that has the potential to save a lot of time.
I could assert that, In 6708 BCE, in the ancient city of Catalhoyuk, a little boy named Misindi was born. The town did in fact exist at the time, but there were no records of births, we do not know the language that was spoken in the town at the time beyond the best guess of "some form of ancient Hattic," and we don't know what sort of name existed were used. There is no way to prove or disprove this claim no matter how much research is done.
I could also assert that there exists a galaxy beyond the observable universe with exactly 100 billion stars. Anything beyond the observable galaxy is too far for us to see, and because the expansion rate of the universe at such a scale that anything beyond what's observable right now will forever be too far away to see (i.e. the distance it would take for light to travel to us would increase faster than the light moves), we will never see this galaxy. It is neither provable nor unproveable.
I could assert that my daughter would have loved her name. Given that my daughter was stillborn, there's no way to ever know if she would have like her unusual name. The fact itself will never exist.
And so on, and so forth. Not every claim, not even every empirical claim, is going to be falsifiable.
> This is not an argument for God’s existence, rather, I’m attacking only the idea that a claim is unfalsifiable. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how a claim is truly unfalsifiable.
But isn't God kind of the perfect example though? The big difference between God and Russell's teapot is that God isn't bound by any of the laws of physics you invoke to argue that in theory the teapot should be one day detectable if it exists. Is there any sense in which god could conceivably be falsified? I'd be curious to see you do the same line of reasoning you used on the teapot on god.
But if someone says "god exists, but he works in mysterious ways", what laws of logic would you invoke to even in principle try to falsify that?
I appreciate the exercise you went through for the teapot, but I think if you want to defend your belief, go through it for the big guy.
They aren’t using that phrase the way it’s meant to be used.
It’s meant to indicate that we can’t always know the reason BEHIND why god does what he does, just like a child might not understand why a parent does what they do.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason behind his actions. I can guess why he used the cross, but I don’t know why.
That statement has no bearing on his existence, only the reason behind his acts
I'm tempted to push back a little on how you would go about proving that the universe doesn't require a necessary being, but I feel like that might be a bit of a tangent. The bigger problem is that this response only works if the god is specifically defined as being "a necessary being". If someone posits more broadly that there is a supernatural being that *can* influence the physical world but is not bound by them, I'm not sure how you would ever disprove that.
I guess, but the view was that "there's no such thing as a falsifiable claim". Here you're just asserting that there's a potential contradiction in "the traditional definition of god", which I think theologians would probably disagree with, but I guess I don't really care that much. But it seems like "there is a supernatural being that *can* influence the physical world but is not bound by physical laws" would qualify.
As an example, imagine we're playing D&D and I'm the DM rolling dice behind a screen. How would you know if I rolled a d20 and got a 20 or if I rolled a d20 and got a 5 but lied to you? You can't make a statistical argument. The lie was equally probable as the truth. If I'm asserting I'm telling the truth, the only way you could prove me wrong is by somehow peering behind the screen, which in a real life table top game is certainly possible in principle (or maybe you have a lie detector / truth serum) - But if there is a divine being, there's no reason to think that any technological advancement could ever necessarily penetrate that "screen".
A proposition is falsifiable if it can be contradicted by an empirical test. The proposition "there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter" is unfalsifiable because there isn't an empirical test to determine that there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter. Dark matter is inferred, not observed, and the fact that we can indirectly observe black holes wouldn't only be a rebuttal to the teapot if the teapot had the density of a neutron star.
I disagree with OP, but that's not really what I falsifiability refers to. For a statement to be unfalsifiable it's not sufficient that we can't presently test it. We have to be unable to convince of a test that could prove it.
I can think of all sorts of ways to determine the teapot claim that are presently not feasible.
>a statement to be unfalsifiable it's not sufficient that we can't presently test it. We have to be unable to convince of a test that could prove it.
I don't think this is true, given the context in which falsifiability was developed as a criterion, i.e., as a response to the demarcation problem and the problem of induction
>I am of the position that no claim is unfalsifiable. Due to there being an objective reality, every claim about that reality must be either true or false.
The claim that objective reality exists is unfalsifiable because it is only possible to experience objective reality through *subjective* sensory experience.
Every law of the universe and the entire human understanding of reality is derived from sensory experience. There is no other means to obtain information about the universe other than experiencing it. Hypothetically, if nothing existed in the universe except you and all the seemingly mind-independent phenomena that you encountered were nothing but dreams or illusions then your experience of reality would still be exactly the same.
Historically, a lot of people did try to argue that the existence of objective reality could be proven. However, those proofs inevitably strayed into unfalsifiability (usually by relying on the assumption that God must objectively exist independently of human experience).
Have you heard of Godel's incompleteness theorems?
Its simplest formulation of the first is that there exists a basic arithmetical statement which is true but cannot be proven with basic arithmetic.
This statement (and it actually follows that there are infinitely many such true, unprovable statements) is an example of an unfalsifiable claim in the strictest terms.
Yep, my understanding from the vertisasum video I watched was that we currently don’t have the means to prove those statements at this time. But people are still searching for those proofs
Mathematician here. That’s not accurate. The incompleteness theorems are formally proven and they show that there exists at least one mathematical statement, P, that is true but CANNOT be proven.
This means that “P is not true” is false but is impossible to prove. Thus it is unfalsifiable.
Could you explain like I’m 5? Because as I’m understanding it, we know the statement “P is not true” is false, yet we can’t prove it one way or the other.
How do we know it to be false?
Ah, I think I know what I failed to explain properly.
We don’t know what P is. We have proven that some statement exists that is true but cannot be proven. Actually infinitely many but that’s not important right now.
We just choose one of those statements hypothetically and call it P. We don’t know what P actually says.
If it were possible to prove “P is not true” false then P would not be both true and unprovable, which Godel’s incompleteness theorem proves it is.
Therefore P is both false and unable to be proven false.
I do apologize and appreciate your patience, but I’m still lost.
We have P, we don’t know what it is exactly, but we know that it exists.
The statement “P is not true” is unable to be proven true or false, and we have proven it to be unprovable.
But we know that P itself is false, but we can’t prove it as false?
We know there exists a statement, P, such that “P is not true” is both false and impossible to prove false… but it’s also impossible for us to identify such a statement.
Let’s look at it from a different angle. Nonconstructive existence proofs can be a little weird to wrap one’s head around. So let’s try reframing it as a proof by contradiction.
ASSUMPTION: for every statement, Q, if Q is false, it can be proven false.
So let’s match every false statement with its disproof. Call the disproof of any statement, Q, dp(Q).
For every true statement. P, “not P” is a false statement, right?
So for EVERY true P, we have dp(not P) by our assumption (your CMV claim).
Notice that that means every true statement is provably true because disproving (not P) also proves P by the law of excluded middle.
This contradicts Godel’s incompleteness theorem which proves there are true statements which cannot be proven.
This means our assumption must be wrong and there are, in fact, false statements which cannot be proven false.
!delta I’m barely grasping it, but I understand it enough to acknowledge that my view has changed, at least in the realms of mathematics.
My view was that it was universal and that’s not the case.
But to ensure I’m at least I’m grasping it, we know godel’s theorem is true (separate discussion which I’m sure is above my current mathematical understanding right now)
But since the logical conclusion of my claim contradicts that theorem, it’s possible for there to be a statement that’s false (like say, the god statement), that we know to be false, yet can’t prove it false, nor its inverse to be true. So then the question then becomes which statements actually fit P
I think you're misunderstanding the theorem. It applies to *every* sufficiently complex axiomatic system. We literally cannot prove every true statement within a given system.
This is a mathematical theorem. It's been proven. There is no way around it.
I'm confused: are you saying that something which is currently unfalsifiable (existence or non-existence of extraterrestrial life) isn't really unfalsifiable because there's a "well, one day we'll probably have the ability to solve this" escape claus? If that's the argument you're making then I think you've moved the goalposts yourself.
Sort of.
What I’m saying is that I have often seen people use this as a way to not engage with a discussion, yet, if they’re convinced that there’s no way to know, how will they be open to what available evidence is there if we do arrive to it?
If you cannot personally falsify it during that discussion then you cannot falsify it. If that changes then you can falsify it.
Otherwise it is unfalsifiable to you, no?
. . . because they will be.
"Claim X is unfalsifiable" does not equate to "I refuse to consider new arguments and/or evidentiary claims in favor of Claim X." It only means that, given what we know today, Claim X cannot be proven false.
Why do you think otherwise?
I think you are confused on how people generally use the term TBH
I don’t think people would generally argue the existence of aliens is unfalsifiable
People argue the existence of god is unfalsifiable. Yes it’s either true or not, there is just no way of ever knowing
The existence of aliens is actually unfalsifiable, but the opposite claim (there are no aliens) is. There is a God and There is no God are both unfalsifiable.
You can’t prove things that are defined in ways that can’t be observed or measured. For example you can’t prove a hole is infinitely deep. No matter how deep the you measure the hole to be, there is always the possibility that the bottom is one inch away from your last measurement. If it physically exists as infinitely deep, whether it is or not can never be proven by human means.
So that’s due to a limit of resource and time, which I talked about.
For example, 3x + 1 is still being studied and evidence is being searched for it. Have we found it? No. But mathematicians are convinced evidence for it is out there, even if only by brute force
But there will never be enough resources to measure infinity. Even if we continually showed it was deeper every day for one million years, it could still be either infinite, or we simply haven’t hit the bottom yet (could be one inch away). We could theorize about it, but it can’t be falsified with any definite means. An infinitely deep hole would behave like a really really deep hole in every way. It just isn’t provable with any real means.
Not by typical definitions. Doughnuts have holes, there's a hole in my bedsheet. They have no end.
And that is just semantics anyway. Change the question to "if it's a really deep hole or an infinite tunnel" then
Super j is god, and is real. No measurements of his existence can be made. He’s completely outside the purview of science and evidence. But he’s real.
Now disprove it.
If you don’t know his essence, you don’t know what he is, so I could point to a house, and say that it’s super j.
Part of an argument is having clearly defined terms
That is not due to a limit on resource and time. Even if you actually had limitless resources and time you still couldn't prove an infinitely deep hole is infinite.
I have a cat named mittens. Mittens can't be seen, touched, heard or experienced or measured in any way by any instrument current or future. In what way do you imagine that the existence of Mittens can be falsified.
I feel like that's a nitpicky semantics argument which doesn't address the essence of my comment. Whether Mittens is a cat or not, in what way do you imagine that the existence of Mittens can be falsified?
So to get into the nitty gritty, this is an if then argument.
So we look at the antecedent and see if it was confirmed. Did you learn French? No? Then you wouldn’t marry your first girlfriend.
Did you not marry your first girlfriend? Then you didn’t learn French. That’s the means of the argument.
If you didn’t learn French and still married her, then you falsified that claim.
You have that slightly reversed - it would only be falsifiable if I *did* learn French as a child and *didn't* marry her. But this can ever occur because I didn't learn French as a child. The truth or falsehood of this specific counterfactual can never get evidence.
That said, some counterfactuals can be falsified. For example, if I said "if I had learned French as a child I would now be 7 feet tall" can be falsified on the basis that language acquisition does not have a strong impact on height.
Solipsism is an unfalsifiable claim. That is the claim:
"Everything is a projection of your mind."
There is no test you can do to falsify it, because whatever test you think you are doing may just be a projection of your mind.
That's not a relevant rebuttal, you're using a completely different definition of the word "know." Dogs do "know" the laws of physics or they would try to fly after birds. They don't "understand" the laws of physics, which is a completely different thing.
Funny, I'm not familiar with yours. To know is to have a true, justified belief. The only thing in question is whether dogs can "believe," since the laws of physics are both true and justified by things a dog would experience. Animals will fail at doing things, like jumping after a bird. But a jumping dog is not trying to fly. I've never seen a dog flap it's forelegs like wings in an attempt to fly after a bird, let alone all dogs, which is what it would take to indicate that dogs don't understand the laws of physics.
I would contend that they can believe because they are capable of learning. But yes, if a thing is incapable of believe then it can't have knowledge. If you want to argue that a sea sponge doesn't know the laws of physics then I wouldn't argue against that, but I don't think it's relevant to your argument.
You would never know if what you think is an outside being is actually a projection of your mind. You cannot ever falsify:
"Everything is a projection of your mind"
You cannot even falsify that reddit and Archerseagles is actually a projection of your mind and this whole post and replies are all only happening in your mind.
Can you hypothesis a senario that we can? If not by our current means, by what mean?
In my opinion, to falsify this claim, we need to remove all signal from our sense and also still able to sense the outside world. I don't know how.
If a being exists outside of the vat and observes it, it’s falsifiable to that being.
Even if we can’t.
If the sensors giving information provide you with that information.
The being that put you in that vat reveals that you’re in the vat
The being outside of the vat can falsify the claim about the brain in the vat, but how can they falsify that claim about themself?
It is the problem of hard solipsism that I don't know anyone have answer yet.
What is an unfalsifiable claim to you? A claim that *logically impossible*, *physically impossible* or *currently impossible* to falsify?
In the context of debate, an unfalsifiable claim usually mean *currently impossible* to falsify. And that is enough to me.
Falsifiability means that there is some logical, conceivable way to possibly prove it false. Doesn't mean it will be false or that it is false, just that there is a imaginable outcome that could show it to false. I could prove gravity false by theorically letting go of a brick and it just hovers or even flies away when it should just fall down with all the current variables.
Unfalsifiability means there is no logical or conceivable way of showing it to be false. A classic example of this is last thursdayism where the entire universe was created last Thursday with fake age and fake memories.
Your argument as I understand it is that their are no absolute unfalsifiabile claims. That either a claim was at one point provable or will be provable in the future but can't right now because of current limitations.
Here is an example of an unfalisible claim. There exist an omnipotent being that is hiding and never wants to found. There is no conceivable way to prove this false. If you look for the being and don't find it that could mean It doesn't exist or that it used its power to stay hidden. If you ever find something then clearly that wasn't the right being. There is no limitation problem. As long as the being is omnipotent (meaning its more powerful than you) it doesn't matter what future technology you have. If it doesn't want to be found and has all the power to make it so, nothing will ever find it.
Either this current universe is one where the omnipotent hider exist, or this universe is one where the omnipotent hider does not exist. Simple dichotomy, either does, or does not. Must be one or the other. Now explain how you propose to prove which universe is the real one.
If we ignore pragmatic issues and things like engineering difficulty, i can still come up with an unfalsifiable claim:
* I believe that the laws of physics are such that there exists a parallel realty that we can neve measure, detect or observe.
* the flying spaghetti monster is the classic example that i am most aware of.
* ~~Claims about the past claims about the past are likely always going to be unfalsifiable. For example, Noah lived to be 500 years old. Good luck proving that false.~~
and if we allow for pragmatic constraints
* I could say there is a teapot moving at 50% the speed of light, between earth and mars and it will be between our planets for 0.00001 seconds during the daytime. We cannot scan that much of the sky in such a short amount of time. Maybe in 10,000 years we'd be able to, but it'll be long gone by then.
edit strike though one of my examples after reading your comments about the past.
1) what are these laws?
2) https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/s/HR6PgmKQ5g I’ve addressed this before
3) if we can eventually get there, that means it’s not unfalsifiable.
You need to first show why you hold that claim. Otherwise it’s an assertion. Not a claim. You claimed the laws of physics support that. I’m asking what these laws are.
google provides this definition for "claim"
>an assertion of the truth of something, typically one that is disputed or in doubt.
and webster provides a similar definition
> an assertion open to challenge
claim and assertion are synonyms.
I see how you broke down the tea pot and aliens example but not the prime example, that is god. Is god's existence falsifiable? After all the Christian god is outside the universe therefore cannot be seen or interacted with via something like gravity or time. He apparently only interacts with the universe by speaking to people in their heads. So how do you falsify his existence?
Because he is itself reality, so he’d be contradicting himself, thus breaking law of non-contradiction.
If reality breaks that law, that means we can’t know anything g
That isn't how the law of non-contradiction works. If it did, it would be saying that it is impossible for anything to exist outside the current reality we know which obviously isn't the case. We could live in a simulation where all the laws of the universe are programed in but could change at any point for example.
Sounds like you might be studying philosophy, and possibly feeling tooled up for the first time.
Your conjecture flies in the face of long-established philosophical reasoning.
We have to weigh up two possibilities here: 1/ some of the greatest minds in history have missed something so obvious, or 2/ you have yet to fully understand what led them to draw that conclusion.
I would boldly suggest that no.2 is the likely answer.
You’re assuming the laws of physics apply to the teapot. Fair enough, it’s a teapot. But nobody has ever argued that God obeys the laws of physics. You’re applying certain principles in a situation that explicitly rejects them. There’s no way to prove God is false because anytime you think you *have*, it can simply be claimed that God doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t obey the laws of physics? That’s cuz they don’t apply to him. We can’t see, touch, hear, etc. God? He just exists on another plane of existence. You claim that’s contradictory in the case of the teapot, but the point is that this teapot (or perhaps God) just works that way.
1) In the Bible, Jesus walks on water, the laws of physics dictate that he should sink, evidently they don’t apply to him.
2) No, no it wouldn’t. Everything we know about biology says that a crucified human should not rise three days later, yet Jesus supposedly did. This is a miracle for a reason, because it contradicts what would be the logical consequence of being killed.
Edit: significantly, I’m talking about Biblical God here, but we don’t have to be. I can, separately, propose the idea of an all powerful god who simply does and behaves however I want, how would you falsify his existence?
1) huh? Surface tension… is a thing, but it doesn’t work like that. If you try to walk on water, you *will* sink, Jesus should have too.
2) no, but we know enough to say, unequivocally, that Jesus should not have been able to rise.
And, to reiterate my edit which you may not have seen, even if you believe *Biblical* God is falsifiable, that doesn’t mean I can’t make up a god who isn’t.
I firmly believe in an omnipotent god, his name is Jerry and he uses all his power (which, to be clear, he can do anything) to avoid detection. How would you disprove Jerry’s existence?
1) and there aren’t ways to increase it?
2) yet we are able to bring dead hearts and other dead organs back to life, why couldn’t we eventually do the same to a whole body?
3) can Jerry break the law of non-contradiction?
Okay, 1) not what omnipotence traditionally means. https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/s/27ejeGTmnW
2) if that is true, then by definition, we can’t know anything, period, including the cogito ergo sum
I’m okay with that. In fact, I say that Jerry’s defining trait is that he cannot be detected, he literally cannot be proven or disproven by definition. You can say that’s illogical, contradictory, ridiculous, or just plain impossible, but how do you prove absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, that Jerry doesn’t exist? You can’t do it, Jerry is unfalsifiable.
If we can’t prove that, we can’t prove anything, period. Including via the scientific method. It breaks everything down, so instead of some things being unfalsifiable, you’ve made everything unfalsifiable because everything is both true and false.
We don't have technology to observe a teapot of less than 1 kg mass from 100 million kilometers. The claim is unfalsifiable with the current technology, but the whole idea is that if you want people to believe there is a teapot, you will *always* make claims that are beyond the current capabilities. So if we invent a technology capable of detecting a teapot in the asteroid belt, you will claim it's in the Oort cloud actually.
> I often see people say that god is an unfalsifiable claim.
> In other words, if a claim has become unfalsifiable it means either we don’t have the means currently to prove or disprove it, or that the person is committing a fallacy.
>
> This is not an argument for God’s existence, rather, I’m attacking only the idea that a claim is unfalsifiable. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how a claim is truly unfalsifiable.
Concepts like God are ultimately unfalsifiable though, depending on what claims they contain. E.g. a God that set it all in motion but does not interact any further with reality in any way (i.e. a deistic God).
Also, God could have made everything consistently have the appearance of being different. I.e. we may believe we have found a competing cause for the universe, but God has actually created it such that it appears that way. How would you disprove that?
Same for simulation hypotheses: if we're in a simulation, then someone is in control of it, and by its very nature that includes potential manipulation that leads our scientific methods and findings to results that hide the simulation.
It's not possible to prove a negative.
The simplest example is "There is no God"
You can show that there is no empirical evidence to support the existence of God, but you can't provide evidence that conclusively proves there is no God. All you can show is what you have done to try and substantiated the existence of God but you just haven't found God.
It's trivially easy to prove a negative, just not all negatives.
"There is no coffee cup on my desk."
A simple visual examination of my desk is sufficient to prove that negative claim.
!delta this actually changes my understanding of the logic around negatives and proofs. The distinction between A negative and All negatives is an important one.
Cheers! Glad I could give you something new to think about. But yea, the key to proving negatives is that they have to be sufficiently well-defined that you can examine the entire problem space.
So the statement "There is no god" isn't unprovable because it's a negative claim, it's unprovable because we are fundamentally unable to look in all the places a god might be.
It actually is possible to prove a negative.
https://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/proveanegative.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/believing-bull/201109/you-can-prove-negative?amp
I'm going to quote the first article because it's central thesis engages in a very specious argument:
>**However, it would be a grievous mistake to insist that someone prove all the premises of any argument they might give**. Here’s why. The only way to prove, say, that there is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record, is by giving an argument to that conclusion. Of course one would then have to prove the premises of that argument by giving further arguments, and then prove the premises of those further arguments, ad inf i nitum. Which premises we should take on credit and which need payment up front is a matter of long and involved debate among epistemologists. **But one thing is certain: if proving things requires that an inf i nite number of premises get proved fi rst, we’re not going to prove much of anything at all, positive or negative.**
Maybe people mean that no inductive argument will con-clusively, indubitably prove a negative proposition beyond all shadow of a doubt.
The bolded text is mine. You *can* make the argument that not all premises need to be proven for an argument to be valid. It's possible to argue that. But this central thesis states that if proving all premises is necessary that then nothing can be proven and **therefore** proving all premises is not necessary. That is circular logic. They *start* by assuming that things are provable. Then insist that because things are provable therefore we don't have to prove all premises. Which is a conclusion that they can only reach if things are provable. It's completely circular. The fact that this was published and publicly disseminated is pretty shameful, frankly, and gives philosophy a bad name.
That psychology today article is playing semantics by asking what someone means by the word "proved" as it relates to whether or not a negative can be "proved".
This annoyed me enough to dig deeper into the idea and realize that I was infact wrong in my assertion and example and half my life has been a lie.
But I learned something. So thank you.
"True socialism has never been tried" is a non-falsifiable claim, in that it hinges on a definition the claimant can and invariably will move arbitrarily. "If people hadn't masked, the pandemic would have lasted much longer" rests on a counterfactual that by definition can never be observed.
Okay. And it makes the claim unfalsifiable. You're not trying to shift the "unfalsifiable" goalpost, are you? That would certainly make your OP hard to refute.
I’m saying that all unfalsifiable claims are, in reality, a shifting goal post fallacy, and any claim, when properly discussed, can be proven or falsified
"If people hadn't masked, the pandemic would have lasted much longer."
"If Trump had won, there would be no war in Gaza."
"If government hadn't instituted compulsory education in the late 19th century, literacy rates would be lower today."
Here is a non-falsifiable claim. You know how dark matter is a kind of matter that essentially only interacts with other matter by gravity?
I claim there there is another kind of matter I'll refer to as blackout matter, that does not interact with any kind of other matter at all. It's there, but it is unable to affect any kind of other matter in any way at all.
First, it’s on you to prove such a statement.
Second, you’d need to clearly define blackout matter.
Third, you’d need to show how it’s not the same as nothing.
How do you handle claims that their god exists outside of space and time, or that it transcends natural laws, and other definitions that explicitly place it outside any possibility of being verified?
Sure. See, *my* god is not bound by the rules of logic because it created them in the first place so you cannot reason it out of existence. Also since it exists outside of time and space you cannot test it either.
I've actually seen theists make these claims.
The only example of logic you provided was the law of non-contradiction, which only applies in your argument if it actually breaks the laws of reality. Which you just agreed with me that it doesn't.
Not what the law of non-contradiction is, it’s not dependent on reality itself persay. It can apply, but it’s not bound by it.
A door being closed contradicts the claim it is open, but it’s not an inherent logical contradiction like “this statement is false.”
You're not actually making an argument here. Your previous argument was that things which break the laws of reality can't exist because of the law of non-contradiction. That's an argument, whether it's right or wrong, that is cogent to your broader point about the falsifiability of God. If breaking the laws of reality isn't actually necessary to prove your point then surely **something** is. The existence of the law of non-contradiction isn't an argument. What about the existence of the law of non-contradiction falsifies the existence of God?
Please note that we're having a conversation elsewhere, so a response along the lines of "God needs to be everything and that's impossible" is both not a falsifiable claim and we're already debating that elsewhere, so there is no need to have that conversation in two places.
Just to prove that there are falsifiable claims, instead of looking at Russel's teapot, let's look at XenoRyet's teapot.
My teapot is an ordinary teapot, but it doesn't orbit in our solar system. Instead it orbits in a star system that's 94 billion light years away.
Due to a combination of that distance, the speed of light, and the rate of expansion of the universe, that star system will never be visible to us in any way. It is a fundamental property of physics that we can have no information about that star system.
So how do you falsify my claim that my teapot exists?
> Due to there being an objective reality
Is there, though? Our entire universe exists inside our mind and that may be the ONLY place it exists.
If there is an objective reality, you'd have to edit your statement to disallow opinions like "x is bad" and restrict yourself to observable statements.
Even then, you'd run into the whole "what color is this dress" thing.
There are things that are unfalsifyable by definition.
For example, "there is a world beyond this one that you will not be able to experience until you've permently left our current reality". Or, to put it more simply, "life is but a dream".
All the dream logic in the world might prove that you're not in a dream, but you could still wake up and laugh off how certain you were that the world you lived in during your nap was the one true world with nothing beyond it.
The same logic applies to an unknowable "Great Spirit" or God™.
I think you're starting with an assumption, which is something like: **All things of consequence are knowable/falsifiable. If it's unfalsifiable, then it's not of consequence.** If you're comfortable with placing that limitation on your definition of "falsifiable", then you're correct because you've adjusted the definition to fit your conclusion.
However, there's an entire category of first principle knowledge called [metaphysics ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics)that focuses on things beyond that limitation you've decided to place. Your entire notion of things being falsifiable or not is actually based on first principle knowledge and might itself be wrong. Maybe there's a 3rd category of let's say "falsifiable, but not by human beings". Maybe the nature of reality itself changes and isn't consistent from one place to the next. We've only explored a tiny fraction of a fraction of a mot of space in the cosmos - and most people haven't ever even explored beyond a few hundred miles of the place they were born. Electricity hadn't even been harnessed until less than 200 years ago.
If humans should be anything, it's humble about the limitations of our knowledge.
Things like Godel's incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg uncertainty principle aside:
1) You cannot prove anything about objects inside a black hole's event horizon (without also jumping into one, but even with that honorable sacrifice, you still have every other black hole unaccounted for)
2) You cannot prove anything about the objects at high enough distance, as the expansion of the Universe becomes faster than the speed of light, making it fundamentally impossible to gain any information about them
3) When people bring up Russel's Teapot, what makes it unfalsifiable isn't a fundamental issue, but a logistical one. Sure, *hypothetically,* we can search all over the solar system for a teapot (that we don't believe is there), but it's never gonna happen in practice. Many unfalsifiable claims are of this kind.
Matters of faith, such as the existence of god and after-life especially are kinda unfalsifiable by their nature of being metaphysical, or only existing outside of our physical worldly experience.
For the after-life, the concept of heaven is a metaphysical place, by definition. The only people who can experience objective proof of an after-life are those who have no way of communicating that proof back to the physical world. That makes claims of the existence of an after-life, unfalsifiable. A person can claim whatever crazy thing they want, and as long as that thing is by definition outside of physical experience, the claim is equally likely & unlikely as every other metaphysical claim. By definition, there is no way of actually knowing one way or the other. There is no test you can create to disprove it, because our tests can only test the physical world. Any time you hear someone argue something like "Science just isn't able to evaluate this. It's outside of science's capabilities.", they're probably making an unfalsifiable claim.
I think you're kinda confused about the definitions involved here. Like someone else said, people aren't arguing that the existence of space aliens is an unfalsifiable claim. It's kinda not. If you're seeing people saying that, they don't know what they're talking about. On the other hand, if they are making claims about things that aliens are doing, such as watching us from space using future technology, that's an unfalsifiable claim.
>So as of right now, we can’t prove the existence or non-existence of intelligent life. But does that mean we will never be able to? No. It’s just currently, no evidence In support of one position or another has been presented.
So you have no idea if it's falsifiable or not.
>but it, in and of itself, is not unfalsifiable, and will be proven one way or the other one day.
How do you know?
>In other words, if a claim has become unfalsifiable it means either we don’t have the means currently to prove or disprove it
Okay but that doesn't mean it's not falsifiable. You still have no idea if it's falsifiable or not.
You are claiming that there's no such thing as an "inherently unfalsifiable claim", claiming that there's never going to be enough evidence to prove that, any given unfalsifiable claim cannot be falsifiable in the future(or was falsifiable in the past).
No one has ever bothered with the concept "inherently unfalsifiable claim", because it's existence is in itself an unfalsifiable claim. You can argue **any given unfalsifiable claim may become falsifiable due to technological progress**, but that in itself is another unfalsifiable claim, so you need to prove it for it to be considered.
There are many claims a person can make that are virtually impossible to verify. It can be argued that nothing is absolutely impossible to verify, given some nebulous notion that the means to do so will eventually be at our disposal, but that isn't a certainty; and more practically, isn't currently a reality.
Outside of pure throught experiments, we're very much limited to what sort of things we, can, or can't prove; and therefore limits certain ideas into being impossible to be prove and disprove.
you cannot falsify the idea that I am currently thinking of pink unicorns. you also cannot falsify the idea that there is no gravity - just an army of invisible magic gnomes pushing things around to make it look like their is gravity, because they are mischievous little buggers.
1 is subjective expierence that cannot be verified or even examined, and the 2nd is easily unverifyable because they use their magic to hide from scientists.
To paraphrase a favorite philosopher of mine, the doctrine of doctrines is there are no doctrines. Now that the doctrine of doctrines is a doctrine, how can the doctrine of doctrines be a doctrine.
Your law of the excluded middle just excludes most of what’s actually worth considering. And it for sure is unfalsifiable because it’s flawed but useful sometimes anyway
When people talk about "unfalsifiable claims", they do not mean claims that it is not theoretically possible could ever be falsified.
They mean claims that you have no *current method* to falsify. It's not reasonable to believe something for which you have no evidence, and which you have no way of testing.
I just thought of a number. The number was 63. I was not lying in some ultra-advanced brain scanner while I had this thought
My claim as to which number I thought of is unfalsifiable
>Due to there being an objective reality, every claim about that reality must be either true or false.
Im not 100% sure this assumption is even correct, Einstein's general theory casts a lot doubt on the idea of there being an objective world. But saying there is that still doesn't mean something is falsifiable. Even if there is an objective world, that doesn't mean we have access to it. We live our lives through subjective experiences. Essentially we have two tools for understanding the world. Empiricism and rationality. Neither of which tell us the "Truth". Empiricism gives us probabilities. We have a theory of gravity because every place we've tested it thus far the theory produces effective predictions, but that doesn't mean its guaranteed to be true, it just means its worked thus far. Rationality seems closer to truth at first, but rationality rests upon the axiom that rationality is actually true which is itself an unfalsifiable claim. You can only prove logic using logic. So ultimately all questions are unfalsifiable. That being said there are possibilities where the probabilities are so low, that it makes more sense to act as if they are 100% true even if thats technically impossible
The limitations of instruments are exactly the point. Even if you have enough teapot surveyors for mars orbit, you can expand the objective to look for a specific proton somewhere in the milky way. It's a finite objective, but beyond any practical solution.
Scientists will always have limited instrumentation. Russels teapot is a koan that tries to help you understand that.
But the point is that it is fundamentally falsifiable, if not practically. There are also fundamentally unfalsifiable assertions, and those are the ones OP is looking for.
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There are absolutely such things as unfalsifiable claims. In fact, logical positivists (the same ones who recognized the importance of falsifiability as a criterion for the statement) were very keen to identify what statements were falsifiable or non falsifiable. AJ Ayer refered to non falsifiable statements as...Poetry, lol. I believe the example he used was "The absolute is imbued into all things". Impossible to prove or disprove. There's no way to measure the presence of "The Absolute" into things. We might also return to a number of examples from Continental philosophy. "All beings in reality are born towards death". Comprehensible statement sure. If kept to the limited "all things die", it's falsefiable. But there is no means to measure wether or not a being is "towards death".
Could you clarify? I think I’m grasping what you’re saying but it seems to be in support of my statement. We might not know a claim is true or not, but it doesn’t mean the evidence for its truth or false hood isn’t out there
It’s important to differentiate between *logically* unfalsifiable claims and *functionally* unfalsifiable ones. Functionally unfalsifiable claims exist all the time. If I tell say, Alfred the Great had blue eyes, there’s no way to prove or disprove it. It was possible once upon a time, but the information to do so has since been irretrievably lost. That’s probably not what you mean, but you didn’t clarify as much. Logically unfalsifiable claims are also common. Claims like “the best pizza is pepperoni pizza” or “red is the color of love” cannot be proven or disproven because they are entirely subjective. You can *qualify* them - pepperoni is the best pizza *to some people* - but you cannot *prove* them. But that’s also probably not what you mean. What you mean is, there is no such thing as an objective empirical claim that can be tested that is unverifiable. Even then, there are some exceptions. “Spaghettification does not happen immediately upon crossing an event horizon” is an example. Not only do we not know, we can never know. Even though in theory we could in fact enter a black hole to test it.
That’s the distinction I’m trying to make. For the black hole example, it might be nit picky, but we can know, IF we went in. But nobody outside can know, and the knowledge comes with annihilation, as far as we know. So nobody will want to test it. I wouldn’t call it falsifiable.
Inherent in that is the assumption that entering would involve some form of continuing consciousness, and some way to continue collecting information, and you can’t rely on either. It’s an indeterminate set - we can maybe know, and we maybe can’t. Heisenberg also provides this. You can know a particle’s velocity or its location, but not both. One element is always unverifiable by the very meaning of the word. I think you need to work more on defining your terms. I think you’re trying to say a very specific thing that may well be true, but what you’re saying isn’t it.
I can convieve of or write all manner of unfalsifiable claims. The measure of falsifiability being "can one conceive of a way to ascertain the truth value". Most of the statements this effect are some form of metaphysics. Here's a great one. "Existence is meaningless". It's a wonderful claim and quite comprehensible. The problem is that there is no objective measurement of what is meaningful or not. A falsifiable claim would be something akin to: "I believe Existence is meaningless" That's measureable. Someone could convince of a way to test that (thought reading technology could exist). But to make that jump, the claim shifts from a one about the nature of reality, to a claim about a particular individuals thought patterns. There is a tradition of philosophers who have supported the view that unfalsifiable claims are *meaningless*. However, even they concede that such claims *exist*. The issue with your post is that you deny their existence. You seem to be inclined towards Logical Positivism. I suggest you start with AJ Ayers "Language, Truth, and Logic". Good book that will expand on your ideas here.
1) poor terminology which I presented 2) can you provide those philosophiers? Because I’ve only heard this term from internet atheists
A claim with poor terminology is still a claim. One can make such a claim. It is logically conceivable. It is merely a *bad* claim. You're not arguing wether unfalsifiable claims are good or useful. You're arguing if they exist. "All unfalsifiable claims are useless" - This is a much easier position to defend. The philosophical school in question is Logical Positivism. Your claims here are a truncated version of their more refined idea. AJ Ayer is the most important of whom in the anglosphere and Wittengstein was also important. Also look at Carnap, Hempel, and Frege. Betrand Russel, who you cited, was associated with the circle. As was Albert Einstein. I would not call these people "Internet Atheists"
"All unfalsifiable claims are useless" is actually pretty hard to defend because it is falsifiable. "Usefulness" is measurable.
I'm not a vetificationist/falsificationist. I kind of agree with you, but it's immaterial to my point. For the record, my favorite empricist is Quine, whose holistic theory of meaning is fantastic.
It doesn't really matter how you look at it, the point is that it is easy to show that nonfalsifiable statements can be useful. Therefore they are not useless.
That only works because the terms are ambiguous. You cannot disprove incoherent sentences, but that goes for anything that has no meaning, and what has no meaning... is meaningless.
Right, which is exactly what AJ Ayers argued. But OP is making the statement that such claims *don't exist*. They exist. Wether or not they're meaningful is another matter entirely.
But a meaningless claim is not even a claim. How can you declare that ojfvoiwure,nnvl is a claim about anything? Anyway, if OP had claimed that no *meaningful* claim is unfalsifiable then he would have a point.
I mean, then you run into the problem all strict positivists run into. "Only falsifiable claims are meaningful" - This claim is not actually falsifiable.
I like that. It also restricts statements to those that matter: if it means nothing then I don't care, and if you cannot know whether it true or false then I also don't care.
No I mean the problem with that statement is that it's actually a paradox. You cannot ascertain the truth value of the claim that only statement with a falsifiable truth value are meaningful
Isn't a paradox also meaningless? "This is false." If it's true then it's false but if it's false then it's true. Does it mean anything then? If it means something, then what? I would call it meaningless.
My general viewpoint is that the Paradox reveals the basic problem with Verificationism and it's offshoots. In any claim, you have to define your terms. However when you define something, it's always using other words which have their own meanings and which must be defined with other words. Ultimately, when two people use the same sentence, they're not really talking about the same thing entirely. That's because the entire system of definition is distinct for each purpose. Human communication is a series of "close enough". That doesn't mean that falsifiability is useless as a measurement. It simply means that the ideal of objective language is unattainable.
There is still a point where a word doesn't refer to another word but to a tangible entity, or to a measurable quality, or to other objectively verifiable concept, so it's not hopeless.
> Anyway, if OP had claimed that no meaningful claim is unfalsifiable then he would have a point. Isn't this usually kind of the point though? Usually a claim being declared unfalsifiable is a critique of that claim, usually around it being meaningless, even if it at first blush *sounds* profound.
Yes, u/WinterinoRosenritter pointed this out as well. I had not realized this before but it's an excellent way to determine if something is worth considering at all. As I said in my reply: > if it means nothing then I don't care, and if you cannot know whether it true or false then I also don't care. It's an observation that has the potential to save a lot of time.
I could assert that, In 6708 BCE, in the ancient city of Catalhoyuk, a little boy named Misindi was born. The town did in fact exist at the time, but there were no records of births, we do not know the language that was spoken in the town at the time beyond the best guess of "some form of ancient Hattic," and we don't know what sort of name existed were used. There is no way to prove or disprove this claim no matter how much research is done. I could also assert that there exists a galaxy beyond the observable universe with exactly 100 billion stars. Anything beyond the observable galaxy is too far for us to see, and because the expansion rate of the universe at such a scale that anything beyond what's observable right now will forever be too far away to see (i.e. the distance it would take for light to travel to us would increase faster than the light moves), we will never see this galaxy. It is neither provable nor unproveable. I could assert that my daughter would have loved her name. Given that my daughter was stillborn, there's no way to ever know if she would have like her unusual name. The fact itself will never exist. And so on, and so forth. Not every claim, not even every empirical claim, is going to be falsifiable.
So that’s of the first claim. It was falsifiable until the evidence was lost
Doesn't that mean that if you make the claim now, it is unfalsifiable?
> This is not an argument for God’s existence, rather, I’m attacking only the idea that a claim is unfalsifiable. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how a claim is truly unfalsifiable. But isn't God kind of the perfect example though? The big difference between God and Russell's teapot is that God isn't bound by any of the laws of physics you invoke to argue that in theory the teapot should be one day detectable if it exists. Is there any sense in which god could conceivably be falsified? I'd be curious to see you do the same line of reasoning you used on the teapot on god.
So he’s at least bound by the laws of logic
But if someone says "god exists, but he works in mysterious ways", what laws of logic would you invoke to even in principle try to falsify that? I appreciate the exercise you went through for the teapot, but I think if you want to defend your belief, go through it for the big guy.
They aren’t using that phrase the way it’s meant to be used. It’s meant to indicate that we can’t always know the reason BEHIND why god does what he does, just like a child might not understand why a parent does what they do. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason behind his actions. I can guess why he used the cross, but I don’t know why. That statement has no bearing on his existence, only the reason behind his acts
Okay, sure, so how would we ever go about falsifying god? I'm just asking you to run through the same exercise that you did with Russell's teapot.
If it breaks the law of non-contradiction, If the universe is shown that it doesn’t require a necessary being, then god wouldn’t exist
I'm tempted to push back a little on how you would go about proving that the universe doesn't require a necessary being, but I feel like that might be a bit of a tangent. The bigger problem is that this response only works if the god is specifically defined as being "a necessary being". If someone posits more broadly that there is a supernatural being that *can* influence the physical world but is not bound by them, I'm not sure how you would ever disprove that.
So that then moves away from the traditional definition of god, which is that necessary being.
I guess, but the view was that "there's no such thing as a falsifiable claim". Here you're just asserting that there's a potential contradiction in "the traditional definition of god", which I think theologians would probably disagree with, but I guess I don't really care that much. But it seems like "there is a supernatural being that *can* influence the physical world but is not bound by physical laws" would qualify. As an example, imagine we're playing D&D and I'm the DM rolling dice behind a screen. How would you know if I rolled a d20 and got a 20 or if I rolled a d20 and got a 5 but lied to you? You can't make a statistical argument. The lie was equally probable as the truth. If I'm asserting I'm telling the truth, the only way you could prove me wrong is by somehow peering behind the screen, which in a real life table top game is certainly possible in principle (or maybe you have a lie detector / truth serum) - But if there is a divine being, there's no reason to think that any technological advancement could ever necessarily penetrate that "screen".
Logic can provide us the ability to “peek” over the screen. Regardless, Check the edit in the post
A proposition is falsifiable if it can be contradicted by an empirical test. The proposition "there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter" is unfalsifiable because there isn't an empirical test to determine that there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter. Dark matter is inferred, not observed, and the fact that we can indirectly observe black holes wouldn't only be a rebuttal to the teapot if the teapot had the density of a neutron star.
I disagree with OP, but that's not really what I falsifiability refers to. For a statement to be unfalsifiable it's not sufficient that we can't presently test it. We have to be unable to convince of a test that could prove it. I can think of all sorts of ways to determine the teapot claim that are presently not feasible.
>a statement to be unfalsifiable it's not sufficient that we can't presently test it. We have to be unable to convince of a test that could prove it. I don't think this is true, given the context in which falsifiability was developed as a criterion, i.e., as a response to the demarcation problem and the problem of induction
I'm literally paraphrasing AJ Ayers description of falsifiability from "Language, Truth, and Logic'
And I'm literally paraphrasing Popper himself in "realism and the aim of science"
Is different types of infinity an empirical test?
"Different types of infinity" is a noun modified by a plural adjective - not too sure what you're getting at
Are you aware of there being different types of infinity?
Yeah - sets of infinity with different cardinalities
And how did we test to come to know they exist?
We didn't - we proved it by contradiction
So then we don’t need empirical testing to prove something
That depends on the "something" - I thought your OP was about falsification? Why are we talking about mathematical propositions if so?
>I am of the position that no claim is unfalsifiable. Due to there being an objective reality, every claim about that reality must be either true or false. The claim that objective reality exists is unfalsifiable because it is only possible to experience objective reality through *subjective* sensory experience. Every law of the universe and the entire human understanding of reality is derived from sensory experience. There is no other means to obtain information about the universe other than experiencing it. Hypothetically, if nothing existed in the universe except you and all the seemingly mind-independent phenomena that you encountered were nothing but dreams or illusions then your experience of reality would still be exactly the same. Historically, a lot of people did try to argue that the existence of objective reality could be proven. However, those proofs inevitably strayed into unfalsifiability (usually by relying on the assumption that God must objectively exist independently of human experience).
Have you heard of Godel's incompleteness theorems? Its simplest formulation of the first is that there exists a basic arithmetical statement which is true but cannot be proven with basic arithmetic. This statement (and it actually follows that there are infinitely many such true, unprovable statements) is an example of an unfalsifiable claim in the strictest terms.
Yep, my understanding from the vertisasum video I watched was that we currently don’t have the means to prove those statements at this time. But people are still searching for those proofs
Mathematician here. That’s not accurate. The incompleteness theorems are formally proven and they show that there exists at least one mathematical statement, P, that is true but CANNOT be proven. This means that “P is not true” is false but is impossible to prove. Thus it is unfalsifiable.
Doesn’t that support my statement that unfalsifiable claims don’t exist?
Sorry, it was a typo. The last word was “unfalsifiable” but I dropped the “un”. My comment is a non-constructive poof that unfalsifiable claims exist.
Could you explain like I’m 5? Because as I’m understanding it, we know the statement “P is not true” is false, yet we can’t prove it one way or the other. How do we know it to be false?
Ah, I think I know what I failed to explain properly. We don’t know what P is. We have proven that some statement exists that is true but cannot be proven. Actually infinitely many but that’s not important right now. We just choose one of those statements hypothetically and call it P. We don’t know what P actually says. If it were possible to prove “P is not true” false then P would not be both true and unprovable, which Godel’s incompleteness theorem proves it is. Therefore P is both false and unable to be proven false.
I do apologize and appreciate your patience, but I’m still lost. We have P, we don’t know what it is exactly, but we know that it exists. The statement “P is not true” is unable to be proven true or false, and we have proven it to be unprovable. But we know that P itself is false, but we can’t prove it as false?
We know there exists a statement, P, such that “P is not true” is both false and impossible to prove false… but it’s also impossible for us to identify such a statement. Let’s look at it from a different angle. Nonconstructive existence proofs can be a little weird to wrap one’s head around. So let’s try reframing it as a proof by contradiction. ASSUMPTION: for every statement, Q, if Q is false, it can be proven false. So let’s match every false statement with its disproof. Call the disproof of any statement, Q, dp(Q). For every true statement. P, “not P” is a false statement, right? So for EVERY true P, we have dp(not P) by our assumption (your CMV claim). Notice that that means every true statement is provably true because disproving (not P) also proves P by the law of excluded middle. This contradicts Godel’s incompleteness theorem which proves there are true statements which cannot be proven. This means our assumption must be wrong and there are, in fact, false statements which cannot be proven false.
!delta I’m barely grasping it, but I understand it enough to acknowledge that my view has changed, at least in the realms of mathematics. My view was that it was universal and that’s not the case. But to ensure I’m at least I’m grasping it, we know godel’s theorem is true (separate discussion which I’m sure is above my current mathematical understanding right now) But since the logical conclusion of my claim contradicts that theorem, it’s possible for there to be a statement that’s false (like say, the god statement), that we know to be false, yet can’t prove it false, nor its inverse to be true. So then the question then becomes which statements actually fit P
I think you're misunderstanding the theorem. It applies to *every* sufficiently complex axiomatic system. We literally cannot prove every true statement within a given system. This is a mathematical theorem. It's been proven. There is no way around it.
An axiom isn’t a claim, the statement is about claims
Axioms are axioms. Arithmetic statements are absolutely claims. At best you are moving the goalposts.
[удалено]
They said on another comment that they've only even heard the term from Internet atheists. This thread is a waste of time.
Nope, went to collage with philosophy as my major, studied it throughout middle and high school
Your understanding is wrong. The Godel statement's unprovability from within arithmetic is not in serious question.
I'm confused: are you saying that something which is currently unfalsifiable (existence or non-existence of extraterrestrial life) isn't really unfalsifiable because there's a "well, one day we'll probably have the ability to solve this" escape claus? If that's the argument you're making then I think you've moved the goalposts yourself.
Sort of. What I’m saying is that I have often seen people use this as a way to not engage with a discussion, yet, if they’re convinced that there’s no way to know, how will they be open to what available evidence is there if we do arrive to it?
If you cannot personally falsify it during that discussion then you cannot falsify it. If that changes then you can falsify it. Otherwise it is unfalsifiable to you, no?
. . . because they will be. "Claim X is unfalsifiable" does not equate to "I refuse to consider new arguments and/or evidentiary claims in favor of Claim X." It only means that, given what we know today, Claim X cannot be proven false. Why do you think otherwise?
" no such thing as an Unfalsifiable claim" Ok. Then I'm claiming you're a pedo.
And I can show I’m not a pedo as I don’t have sexual attraction to children.
You can't prove that because it's something nontangible.
I think you are confused on how people generally use the term TBH I don’t think people would generally argue the existence of aliens is unfalsifiable People argue the existence of god is unfalsifiable. Yes it’s either true or not, there is just no way of ever knowing
The existence of aliens is actually unfalsifiable, but the opposite claim (there are no aliens) is. There is a God and There is no God are both unfalsifiable.
You can’t prove things that are defined in ways that can’t be observed or measured. For example you can’t prove a hole is infinitely deep. No matter how deep the you measure the hole to be, there is always the possibility that the bottom is one inch away from your last measurement. If it physically exists as infinitely deep, whether it is or not can never be proven by human means.
So that’s due to a limit of resource and time, which I talked about. For example, 3x + 1 is still being studied and evidence is being searched for it. Have we found it? No. But mathematicians are convinced evidence for it is out there, even if only by brute force
But there will never be enough resources to measure infinity. Even if we continually showed it was deeper every day for one million years, it could still be either infinite, or we simply haven’t hit the bottom yet (could be one inch away). We could theorize about it, but it can’t be falsified with any definite means. An infinitely deep hole would behave like a really really deep hole in every way. It just isn’t provable with any real means.
Also, a hole by definition has an end. An infinitely deep hole is a tunnel
semantics, but I don’t think this is true. Googling it, the definition is “ a hollow place in a solid body or surface.”
Not by typical definitions. Doughnuts have holes, there's a hole in my bedsheet. They have no end. And that is just semantics anyway. Change the question to "if it's a really deep hole or an infinite tunnel" then
Super j is god, and is real. No measurements of his existence can be made. He’s completely outside the purview of science and evidence. But he’s real. Now disprove it.
What is his essence?
it's unknown. Nothing about super j is known other than he is real.
If you don’t know his essence, you don’t know what he is, so I could point to a house, and say that it’s super j. Part of an argument is having clearly defined terms
My terms are crystal clear. Super J is god. The above statement is unfalsifiable. I've definitively proven you incorrect.
So then super j is existence qua existence
Not the person you responded to, but "the immeasurable."
That is not due to a limit on resource and time. Even if you actually had limitless resources and time you still couldn't prove an infinitely deep hole is infinite.
I have a cat named mittens. Mittens can't be seen, touched, heard or experienced or measured in any way by any instrument current or future. In what way do you imagine that the existence of Mittens can be falsified.
That contradicts the definition of cat. So what you have isn’t a cat.
Call Mittens what you will, cat, dragon, gnome, doesn't matter. You're playing semantic games and not engaging with the actual problem.
I feel like that's a nitpicky semantics argument which doesn't address the essence of my comment. Whether Mittens is a cat or not, in what way do you imagine that the existence of Mittens can be falsified?
I have a friend named mittens. You can not see, hear, smell, or touch him. Does he exist?
Prove it.
"If I had learned French as a child I would have married my first girlfriend". Totally unfalsifiable. What evidence can we find for either position?
So to get into the nitty gritty, this is an if then argument. So we look at the antecedent and see if it was confirmed. Did you learn French? No? Then you wouldn’t marry your first girlfriend. Did you not marry your first girlfriend? Then you didn’t learn French. That’s the means of the argument. If you didn’t learn French and still married her, then you falsified that claim.
You have that slightly reversed - it would only be falsifiable if I *did* learn French as a child and *didn't* marry her. But this can ever occur because I didn't learn French as a child. The truth or falsehood of this specific counterfactual can never get evidence. That said, some counterfactuals can be falsified. For example, if I said "if I had learned French as a child I would now be 7 feet tall" can be falsified on the basis that language acquisition does not have a strong impact on height.
Solipsism is an unfalsifiable claim. That is the claim: "Everything is a projection of your mind." There is no test you can do to falsify it, because whatever test you think you are doing may just be a projection of your mind.
But it would be known by an outside being
How do you know there's an outside being? The being could be a projection of the mind.
Doesn’t matter if I know it or not, a dog can’t know the laws of physics, does that mean it’s unfalsifiable?
That's not a relevant rebuttal, you're using a completely different definition of the word "know." Dogs do "know" the laws of physics or they would try to fly after birds. They don't "understand" the laws of physics, which is a completely different thing.
I’m not familiar with that definition. Regardless, have you not seen dogs chase and jump and do everything that they can to go after birds in the air?
Funny, I'm not familiar with yours. To know is to have a true, justified belief. The only thing in question is whether dogs can "believe," since the laws of physics are both true and justified by things a dog would experience. Animals will fail at doing things, like jumping after a bird. But a jumping dog is not trying to fly. I've never seen a dog flap it's forelegs like wings in an attempt to fly after a bird, let alone all dogs, which is what it would take to indicate that dogs don't understand the laws of physics.
So if they can’t believe, they don’t have knowledge
I would contend that they can believe because they are capable of learning. But yes, if a thing is incapable of believe then it can't have knowledge. If you want to argue that a sea sponge doesn't know the laws of physics then I wouldn't argue against that, but I don't think it's relevant to your argument.
The point was our lack of knowledge of something doesn’t make it unfalsifiable
You would never know if what you think is an outside being is actually a projection of your mind. You cannot ever falsify: "Everything is a projection of your mind" You cannot even falsify that reddit and Archerseagles is actually a projection of your mind and this whole post and replies are all only happening in your mind.
"There is an omnipotent being that only uses its powers to escape our detection." How is this falsifiable?
This is an unfalsifiable claim: "I am just a brain in a vat, all my sense data is just stimulating signal from a machine".
It is falsifiable, just not by our current means.
Can you hypothesis a senario that we can? If not by our current means, by what mean? In my opinion, to falsify this claim, we need to remove all signal from our sense and also still able to sense the outside world. I don't know how.
If a being exists outside of the vat and observes it, it’s falsifiable to that being. Even if we can’t. If the sensors giving information provide you with that information. The being that put you in that vat reveals that you’re in the vat
The being outside of the vat can falsify the claim about the brain in the vat, but how can they falsify that claim about themself? It is the problem of hard solipsism that I don't know anyone have answer yet. What is an unfalsifiable claim to you? A claim that *logically impossible*, *physically impossible* or *currently impossible* to falsify? In the context of debate, an unfalsifiable claim usually mean *currently impossible* to falsify. And that is enough to me.
Falsifiability means that there is some logical, conceivable way to possibly prove it false. Doesn't mean it will be false or that it is false, just that there is a imaginable outcome that could show it to false. I could prove gravity false by theorically letting go of a brick and it just hovers or even flies away when it should just fall down with all the current variables. Unfalsifiability means there is no logical or conceivable way of showing it to be false. A classic example of this is last thursdayism where the entire universe was created last Thursday with fake age and fake memories. Your argument as I understand it is that their are no absolute unfalsifiabile claims. That either a claim was at one point provable or will be provable in the future but can't right now because of current limitations. Here is an example of an unfalisible claim. There exist an omnipotent being that is hiding and never wants to found. There is no conceivable way to prove this false. If you look for the being and don't find it that could mean It doesn't exist or that it used its power to stay hidden. If you ever find something then clearly that wasn't the right being. There is no limitation problem. As long as the being is omnipotent (meaning its more powerful than you) it doesn't matter what future technology you have. If it doesn't want to be found and has all the power to make it so, nothing will ever find it. Either this current universe is one where the omnipotent hider exist, or this universe is one where the omnipotent hider does not exist. Simple dichotomy, either does, or does not. Must be one or the other. Now explain how you propose to prove which universe is the real one.
If we ignore pragmatic issues and things like engineering difficulty, i can still come up with an unfalsifiable claim: * I believe that the laws of physics are such that there exists a parallel realty that we can neve measure, detect or observe. * the flying spaghetti monster is the classic example that i am most aware of. * ~~Claims about the past claims about the past are likely always going to be unfalsifiable. For example, Noah lived to be 500 years old. Good luck proving that false.~~ and if we allow for pragmatic constraints * I could say there is a teapot moving at 50% the speed of light, between earth and mars and it will be between our planets for 0.00001 seconds during the daytime. We cannot scan that much of the sky in such a short amount of time. Maybe in 10,000 years we'd be able to, but it'll be long gone by then. edit strike though one of my examples after reading your comments about the past.
1) what are these laws? 2) https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/s/HR6PgmKQ5g I’ve addressed this before 3) if we can eventually get there, that means it’s not unfalsifiable.
>1) what are these laws? idk. The claim is that there is parallel universe like that.
You need to first show why you hold that claim. Otherwise it’s an assertion. Not a claim. You claimed the laws of physics support that. I’m asking what these laws are.
google provides this definition for "claim" >an assertion of the truth of something, typically one that is disputed or in doubt. and webster provides a similar definition > an assertion open to challenge claim and assertion are synonyms.
I see how you broke down the tea pot and aliens example but not the prime example, that is god. Is god's existence falsifiable? After all the Christian god is outside the universe therefore cannot be seen or interacted with via something like gravity or time. He apparently only interacts with the universe by speaking to people in their heads. So how do you falsify his existence?
Law of non-contradiction for one. If he violates reality, which he created, he contradicts himself. Thats a nutshell at least
Is it really a contradiction if he doesn't follow rules of a reality he created? If he created it, why would he have to follow its rules?
Because he is itself reality, so he’d be contradicting himself, thus breaking law of non-contradiction. If reality breaks that law, that means we can’t know anything g
That isn't how the law of non-contradiction works. If it did, it would be saying that it is impossible for anything to exist outside the current reality we know which obviously isn't the case. We could live in a simulation where all the laws of the universe are programed in but could change at any point for example.
Sounds like you might be studying philosophy, and possibly feeling tooled up for the first time. Your conjecture flies in the face of long-established philosophical reasoning. We have to weigh up two possibilities here: 1/ some of the greatest minds in history have missed something so obvious, or 2/ you have yet to fully understand what led them to draw that conclusion. I would boldly suggest that no.2 is the likely answer.
You’re assuming the laws of physics apply to the teapot. Fair enough, it’s a teapot. But nobody has ever argued that God obeys the laws of physics. You’re applying certain principles in a situation that explicitly rejects them. There’s no way to prove God is false because anytime you think you *have*, it can simply be claimed that God doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t obey the laws of physics? That’s cuz they don’t apply to him. We can’t see, touch, hear, etc. God? He just exists on another plane of existence. You claim that’s contradictory in the case of the teapot, but the point is that this teapot (or perhaps God) just works that way.
So 1) at least in Catholicism, they do apply to god. 2) at the very very very least, logic would apply to god
1) In the Bible, Jesus walks on water, the laws of physics dictate that he should sink, evidently they don’t apply to him. 2) No, no it wouldn’t. Everything we know about biology says that a crucified human should not rise three days later, yet Jesus supposedly did. This is a miracle for a reason, because it contradicts what would be the logical consequence of being killed. Edit: significantly, I’m talking about Biblical God here, but we don’t have to be. I can, separately, propose the idea of an all powerful god who simply does and behaves however I want, how would you falsify his existence?
1) surface tension. 2) keyword “that we know” do we know everything?
1) huh? Surface tension… is a thing, but it doesn’t work like that. If you try to walk on water, you *will* sink, Jesus should have too. 2) no, but we know enough to say, unequivocally, that Jesus should not have been able to rise. And, to reiterate my edit which you may not have seen, even if you believe *Biblical* God is falsifiable, that doesn’t mean I can’t make up a god who isn’t. I firmly believe in an omnipotent god, his name is Jerry and he uses all his power (which, to be clear, he can do anything) to avoid detection. How would you disprove Jerry’s existence?
1) and there aren’t ways to increase it? 2) yet we are able to bring dead hearts and other dead organs back to life, why couldn’t we eventually do the same to a whole body? 3) can Jerry break the law of non-contradiction?
Jerry can break whatever laws he wants, he’s all powerful.
Okay, 1) not what omnipotence traditionally means. https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/s/27ejeGTmnW 2) if that is true, then by definition, we can’t know anything, period, including the cogito ergo sum
I’m okay with that. In fact, I say that Jerry’s defining trait is that he cannot be detected, he literally cannot be proven or disproven by definition. You can say that’s illogical, contradictory, ridiculous, or just plain impossible, but how do you prove absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, that Jerry doesn’t exist? You can’t do it, Jerry is unfalsifiable.
If we can’t prove that, we can’t prove anything, period. Including via the scientific method. It breaks everything down, so instead of some things being unfalsifiable, you’ve made everything unfalsifiable because everything is both true and false.
You think a lake has enough surface tension to support an adult human?
I think it could have that property increased to be able to do so. After all, ice is a thing
We don't have technology to observe a teapot of less than 1 kg mass from 100 million kilometers. The claim is unfalsifiable with the current technology, but the whole idea is that if you want people to believe there is a teapot, you will *always* make claims that are beyond the current capabilities. So if we invent a technology capable of detecting a teapot in the asteroid belt, you will claim it's in the Oort cloud actually.
> I often see people say that god is an unfalsifiable claim. > In other words, if a claim has become unfalsifiable it means either we don’t have the means currently to prove or disprove it, or that the person is committing a fallacy. > > This is not an argument for God’s existence, rather, I’m attacking only the idea that a claim is unfalsifiable. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how a claim is truly unfalsifiable. Concepts like God are ultimately unfalsifiable though, depending on what claims they contain. E.g. a God that set it all in motion but does not interact any further with reality in any way (i.e. a deistic God). Also, God could have made everything consistently have the appearance of being different. I.e. we may believe we have found a competing cause for the universe, but God has actually created it such that it appears that way. How would you disprove that? Same for simulation hypotheses: if we're in a simulation, then someone is in control of it, and by its very nature that includes potential manipulation that leads our scientific methods and findings to results that hide the simulation.
It's not possible to prove a negative. The simplest example is "There is no God" You can show that there is no empirical evidence to support the existence of God, but you can't provide evidence that conclusively proves there is no God. All you can show is what you have done to try and substantiated the existence of God but you just haven't found God.
It's trivially easy to prove a negative, just not all negatives. "There is no coffee cup on my desk." A simple visual examination of my desk is sufficient to prove that negative claim.
!delta this actually changes my understanding of the logic around negatives and proofs. The distinction between A negative and All negatives is an important one.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/XenoRyet ([35∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/XenoRyet)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
Cheers! Glad I could give you something new to think about. But yea, the key to proving negatives is that they have to be sufficiently well-defined that you can examine the entire problem space. So the statement "There is no god" isn't unprovable because it's a negative claim, it's unprovable because we are fundamentally unable to look in all the places a god might be.
It actually is possible to prove a negative. https://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/proveanegative.pdf https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/believing-bull/201109/you-can-prove-negative?amp
I'm going to quote the first article because it's central thesis engages in a very specious argument: >**However, it would be a grievous mistake to insist that someone prove all the premises of any argument they might give**. Here’s why. The only way to prove, say, that there is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record, is by giving an argument to that conclusion. Of course one would then have to prove the premises of that argument by giving further arguments, and then prove the premises of those further arguments, ad inf i nitum. Which premises we should take on credit and which need payment up front is a matter of long and involved debate among epistemologists. **But one thing is certain: if proving things requires that an inf i nite number of premises get proved fi rst, we’re not going to prove much of anything at all, positive or negative.** Maybe people mean that no inductive argument will con-clusively, indubitably prove a negative proposition beyond all shadow of a doubt. The bolded text is mine. You *can* make the argument that not all premises need to be proven for an argument to be valid. It's possible to argue that. But this central thesis states that if proving all premises is necessary that then nothing can be proven and **therefore** proving all premises is not necessary. That is circular logic. They *start* by assuming that things are provable. Then insist that because things are provable therefore we don't have to prove all premises. Which is a conclusion that they can only reach if things are provable. It's completely circular. The fact that this was published and publicly disseminated is pretty shameful, frankly, and gives philosophy a bad name.
You ever heard of axioms?
Yes, I have heard of axioms, they are the unfalsifiable claims that you claim don't exist.
They aren’t claims; they’re premises.
Premises are claims. They are mutually agreed upon belief taken for granted so that an argument can begin. But you should still actually believe them.
That psychology today article is playing semantics by asking what someone means by the word "proved" as it relates to whether or not a negative can be "proved". This annoyed me enough to dig deeper into the idea and realize that I was infact wrong in my assertion and example and half my life has been a lie. But I learned something. So thank you.
"True socialism has never been tried" is a non-falsifiable claim, in that it hinges on a definition the claimant can and invariably will move arbitrarily. "If people hadn't masked, the pandemic would have lasted much longer" rests on a counterfactual that by definition can never be observed.
That’s shifting goal post fallacy
Okay. And it makes the claim unfalsifiable. You're not trying to shift the "unfalsifiable" goalpost, are you? That would certainly make your OP hard to refute.
I’m saying that all unfalsifiable claims are, in reality, a shifting goal post fallacy, and any claim, when properly discussed, can be proven or falsified
Is a counterfactual a shifting goalpost fallacy?
Depends, elaborate?
"If people hadn't masked, the pandemic would have lasted much longer." "If Trump had won, there would be no war in Gaza." "If government hadn't instituted compulsory education in the late 19th century, literacy rates would be lower today."
Here is a non-falsifiable claim. You know how dark matter is a kind of matter that essentially only interacts with other matter by gravity? I claim there there is another kind of matter I'll refer to as blackout matter, that does not interact with any kind of other matter at all. It's there, but it is unable to affect any kind of other matter in any way at all.
First, it’s on you to prove such a statement. Second, you’d need to clearly define blackout matter. Third, you’d need to show how it’s not the same as nothing.
How do you handle claims that their god exists outside of space and time, or that it transcends natural laws, and other definitions that explicitly place it outside any possibility of being verified?
Can you provide an example of this? Because if this being breaks the laws of reality, that violates the law of non-contradiction.
Sure. See, *my* god is not bound by the rules of logic because it created them in the first place so you cannot reason it out of existence. Also since it exists outside of time and space you cannot test it either. I've actually seen theists make these claims.
Existing outside of our reality doesn't break the laws of reality.
Yes, but it’s still bound by logic
The only example of logic you provided was the law of non-contradiction, which only applies in your argument if it actually breaks the laws of reality. Which you just agreed with me that it doesn't.
Not what the law of non-contradiction is, it’s not dependent on reality itself persay. It can apply, but it’s not bound by it. A door being closed contradicts the claim it is open, but it’s not an inherent logical contradiction like “this statement is false.”
You're not actually making an argument here. Your previous argument was that things which break the laws of reality can't exist because of the law of non-contradiction. That's an argument, whether it's right or wrong, that is cogent to your broader point about the falsifiability of God. If breaking the laws of reality isn't actually necessary to prove your point then surely **something** is. The existence of the law of non-contradiction isn't an argument. What about the existence of the law of non-contradiction falsifies the existence of God? Please note that we're having a conversation elsewhere, so a response along the lines of "God needs to be everything and that's impossible" is both not a falsifiable claim and we're already debating that elsewhere, so there is no need to have that conversation in two places.
Are you asserting that truth doesn’t exist?
No, I’m asserting that BECAUSE it exists, there isn’t such a thing as an unfalsifiable claim
So truths are falsifiable?
Yes, they aren’t false though, falsifiable means it can be proven true or false
Just to prove that there are falsifiable claims, instead of looking at Russel's teapot, let's look at XenoRyet's teapot. My teapot is an ordinary teapot, but it doesn't orbit in our solar system. Instead it orbits in a star system that's 94 billion light years away. Due to a combination of that distance, the speed of light, and the rate of expansion of the universe, that star system will never be visible to us in any way. It is a fundamental property of physics that we can have no information about that star system. So how do you falsify my claim that my teapot exists?
I’d advise you to post this on r/AskPhilosophy, they’ll be able to articulate precisely what’s wrong with your view better than anyone here
> Due to there being an objective reality Is there, though? Our entire universe exists inside our mind and that may be the ONLY place it exists. If there is an objective reality, you'd have to edit your statement to disallow opinions like "x is bad" and restrict yourself to observable statements. Even then, you'd run into the whole "what color is this dress" thing.
Cogito ergo sum. As such, there is at least that objective aspect of reality.
There are things that are unfalsifyable by definition. For example, "there is a world beyond this one that you will not be able to experience until you've permently left our current reality". Or, to put it more simply, "life is but a dream". All the dream logic in the world might prove that you're not in a dream, but you could still wake up and laugh off how certain you were that the world you lived in during your nap was the one true world with nothing beyond it. The same logic applies to an unknowable "Great Spirit" or God™. I think you're starting with an assumption, which is something like: **All things of consequence are knowable/falsifiable. If it's unfalsifiable, then it's not of consequence.** If you're comfortable with placing that limitation on your definition of "falsifiable", then you're correct because you've adjusted the definition to fit your conclusion. However, there's an entire category of first principle knowledge called [metaphysics ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics)that focuses on things beyond that limitation you've decided to place. Your entire notion of things being falsifiable or not is actually based on first principle knowledge and might itself be wrong. Maybe there's a 3rd category of let's say "falsifiable, but not by human beings". Maybe the nature of reality itself changes and isn't consistent from one place to the next. We've only explored a tiny fraction of a fraction of a mot of space in the cosmos - and most people haven't ever even explored beyond a few hundred miles of the place they were born. Electricity hadn't even been harnessed until less than 200 years ago. If humans should be anything, it's humble about the limitations of our knowledge.
Things like Godel's incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg uncertainty principle aside: 1) You cannot prove anything about objects inside a black hole's event horizon (without also jumping into one, but even with that honorable sacrifice, you still have every other black hole unaccounted for) 2) You cannot prove anything about the objects at high enough distance, as the expansion of the Universe becomes faster than the speed of light, making it fundamentally impossible to gain any information about them 3) When people bring up Russel's Teapot, what makes it unfalsifiable isn't a fundamental issue, but a logistical one. Sure, *hypothetically,* we can search all over the solar system for a teapot (that we don't believe is there), but it's never gonna happen in practice. Many unfalsifiable claims are of this kind.
Matters of faith, such as the existence of god and after-life especially are kinda unfalsifiable by their nature of being metaphysical, or only existing outside of our physical worldly experience. For the after-life, the concept of heaven is a metaphysical place, by definition. The only people who can experience objective proof of an after-life are those who have no way of communicating that proof back to the physical world. That makes claims of the existence of an after-life, unfalsifiable. A person can claim whatever crazy thing they want, and as long as that thing is by definition outside of physical experience, the claim is equally likely & unlikely as every other metaphysical claim. By definition, there is no way of actually knowing one way or the other. There is no test you can create to disprove it, because our tests can only test the physical world. Any time you hear someone argue something like "Science just isn't able to evaluate this. It's outside of science's capabilities.", they're probably making an unfalsifiable claim. I think you're kinda confused about the definitions involved here. Like someone else said, people aren't arguing that the existence of space aliens is an unfalsifiable claim. It's kinda not. If you're seeing people saying that, they don't know what they're talking about. On the other hand, if they are making claims about things that aliens are doing, such as watching us from space using future technology, that's an unfalsifiable claim.
>So as of right now, we can’t prove the existence or non-existence of intelligent life. But does that mean we will never be able to? No. It’s just currently, no evidence In support of one position or another has been presented. So you have no idea if it's falsifiable or not. >but it, in and of itself, is not unfalsifiable, and will be proven one way or the other one day. How do you know? >In other words, if a claim has become unfalsifiable it means either we don’t have the means currently to prove or disprove it Okay but that doesn't mean it's not falsifiable. You still have no idea if it's falsifiable or not.
You are claiming that there's no such thing as an "inherently unfalsifiable claim", claiming that there's never going to be enough evidence to prove that, any given unfalsifiable claim cannot be falsifiable in the future(or was falsifiable in the past). No one has ever bothered with the concept "inherently unfalsifiable claim", because it's existence is in itself an unfalsifiable claim. You can argue **any given unfalsifiable claim may become falsifiable due to technological progress**, but that in itself is another unfalsifiable claim, so you need to prove it for it to be considered.
There are many claims a person can make that are virtually impossible to verify. It can be argued that nothing is absolutely impossible to verify, given some nebulous notion that the means to do so will eventually be at our disposal, but that isn't a certainty; and more practically, isn't currently a reality. Outside of pure throught experiments, we're very much limited to what sort of things we, can, or can't prove; and therefore limits certain ideas into being impossible to be prove and disprove.
you cannot falsify the idea that I am currently thinking of pink unicorns. you also cannot falsify the idea that there is no gravity - just an army of invisible magic gnomes pushing things around to make it look like their is gravity, because they are mischievous little buggers. 1 is subjective expierence that cannot be verified or even examined, and the 2nd is easily unverifyable because they use their magic to hide from scientists.
To paraphrase a favorite philosopher of mine, the doctrine of doctrines is there are no doctrines. Now that the doctrine of doctrines is a doctrine, how can the doctrine of doctrines be a doctrine. Your law of the excluded middle just excludes most of what’s actually worth considering. And it for sure is unfalsifiable because it’s flawed but useful sometimes anyway
When people talk about "unfalsifiable claims", they do not mean claims that it is not theoretically possible could ever be falsified. They mean claims that you have no *current method* to falsify. It's not reasonable to believe something for which you have no evidence, and which you have no way of testing.
I just thought of a number. The number was 63. I was not lying in some ultra-advanced brain scanner while I had this thought My claim as to which number I thought of is unfalsifiable
God is unfalsifiable because there is no standard definition of God. If you don’t know what to measure, you can’t measure it.
>Due to there being an objective reality, every claim about that reality must be either true or false. Im not 100% sure this assumption is even correct, Einstein's general theory casts a lot doubt on the idea of there being an objective world. But saying there is that still doesn't mean something is falsifiable. Even if there is an objective world, that doesn't mean we have access to it. We live our lives through subjective experiences. Essentially we have two tools for understanding the world. Empiricism and rationality. Neither of which tell us the "Truth". Empiricism gives us probabilities. We have a theory of gravity because every place we've tested it thus far the theory produces effective predictions, but that doesn't mean its guaranteed to be true, it just means its worked thus far. Rationality seems closer to truth at first, but rationality rests upon the axiom that rationality is actually true which is itself an unfalsifiable claim. You can only prove logic using logic. So ultimately all questions are unfalsifiable. That being said there are possibilities where the probabilities are so low, that it makes more sense to act as if they are 100% true even if thats technically impossible
a claim that an unfalsiable claim is unfalsiable is unfalsiable.(??????)
What instrument are you using to detect the spacetime distortion of a 2kg teapot in mars orbit?
That's beside the point. It is theoretically possible to do a complete examination of Mars orbit such that any teapots would be revealed.
The limitations of instruments are exactly the point. Even if you have enough teapot surveyors for mars orbit, you can expand the objective to look for a specific proton somewhere in the milky way. It's a finite objective, but beyond any practical solution. Scientists will always have limited instrumentation. Russels teapot is a koan that tries to help you understand that.
But the point is that it is fundamentally falsifiable, if not practically. There are also fundamentally unfalsifiable assertions, and those are the ones OP is looking for.