Falsififiability
Say I propose that all swans are white. I could verify that idea by checking the color of each swan but that's actually impossible to do. I can disprove the proposition by finding a single black swan - that is the single example proves that the proposition is wrong.
This calls up an image (for me) of scientists designing experiments that rigorously test the statement. How can we be sure that we will always get the same result if we run the experiment again? How can we be sure that the future is like the past?
And the bare fact is that we can't. Catastrophes happen all the time that make the future quite unlike the past. But we can be probably sure of the future in all kinds of ways. I'm pretty sure that the temperature outside is quite a bit warmer today than it was 5 months ago.
Scientists can measure the uncertainty of measurements. It is very tedious work. I found providing errors was the hardest part of my physics labs in university. So when CERN confirmed that a Higgs boson had been detected they specified the very tiny margin of error in the result
Detecting the Higgs proved that a lot of theories that were untestable wrong at the same time it confirmed a particular set of theories.
I read that Popper thought of falsifiability as a way of categorizing scientific ideas - sorting the wheat from the chaff as it were - so that people could concentrate on some ideas over others. Life is short.
I'm no historian but I've heard that in the past people spent a lot of energy (and even blood) over things like the number of angels who could dance on a pin head. It looks to me as if falsification enabled people to focus their energy on productive research and our material reality now reflects that.
Outside of the tautologies of math it seems that everything we know is to a greater or lesser extent provisional. I feel safe going to the store but some segments of the news are continuously feeding me counter examples. Should I take that to mean that it's not safe to go to the store or should I think that I can cope with what the environment presents and duck most dangers.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.