But this does not imply that all beliefs not yet shown false are equal. Beliefs not yet shown false can still be more or less probable than others, as calculated by methods such as Bayes' theorem. Falsification itself can be considered just an extreme case of showing a belief to have zero probability: if you are frequently observing phenomena that your belief says should be improbable, then that suggests your belief is epistemically improbable (i.e. likely false), and if you ever observe something that your belief says should be impossible, then your belief is epistemically impossible (i.e. certainly false). — Pfhorrest
This is contrary to the idea that X ought to be tentatively accepted until falsified — Kenosha Kid
other ideas one finds uncontroversial — Kenosha Kid
Your "if Q then P" is, as you said, a equivalent to "if not-P then not-Q". If that is (probably) true, and Q is true, then P is (probably) true. But that's the falsificationist method, not the confirmationist method.
The confirmationist method would say that if "if P then Q" is (probably) true, and Q is true, then P is (probably) true, and that's simply not a valid way of reasoning, even with the "(probably)"s in there. — Pfhorrest
This is contrary to the idea that X ought to be tentatively accepted until falsified
— Kenosha Kid
I never said it ought to be, only that it may be. — Pfhorrest
all beliefs should be considered justified enough by default to be tentatively held (the liberal part) until reasons can be found to reject them (the critcal part) — Pfhorrest
Pending evidence either way, both X and ~X are permissible beliefs. To say that pending evidence either way, both X and ~X are impermissible beliefs (what I mean by "cynicism") would make it impossible to ever have evidence either way (because you would need some beliefs to be the evidence, but you couldn't hold those without others that you also aren't permitted to hold yet, ad infinitum), and so impossible for any belief in anything to ever be permissible. — Pfhorrest
Is it okay to believe in those things you think are uncontroversial without first proving that they're correct from the ground up? — Pfhorrest
This is not correct, you keep presenting it backwards; which amounts to refuting a strawman. — Janus
you're arguing against the deductively invalid form of arguemnt "If P then Q, Q therefore P", because you associate it with verificationism or confirmationism — Janus
repeated observations coupled with an enormous accumulated body of theory based on those observations does give us good reason to think in many contexts that when we observe what is predicted we are warranted to hold (always provisionally) many things to be confirmed. — Janus
So it is the liberal part I'm referring to: that any given belief should be considered justified enough to be tentatively accepted — Kenosha Kid
This would include any absurd yet so far untested belief that I might make up: that spiders are telepathic, or that The Great Geoff lives on an asteroid orbiting the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, or that the CIA are controlled by a secretive Inuit conglomerate. — Kenosha Kid
But this is not what I suggested. I said that I can suspend judgment on either given no facts to support either. We aren't obliged to take a firm position on everything. Do I believe Jesus lived or not? Neither. I don't know, and I don't really care. It's a matter of supreme indifference to me. — Kenosha Kid
the view that ideas must be falsified or held tentatively as true — Kenosha Kid
The more evidence for an unfalsified idea — Kenosha Kid
However strongly justified a belief, a reasonable person must reject it the moment they see it falsified. In the meantime, so long as the belief is both falsifiable and consistent with the world, the believer is perfectly justified in holding it to be as if it were true, i.e. to have assumptions about the world. — Kenosha Kid
(Nor, if you yourself feel inclined to accept it, demand proof from yourself or else reject it; if it seems true to you, go ahead and believe it). — Pfhorrest
The inability to ever have evidence for something, rather than merely against the alternatives, is the whole point of falsificationism. — Pfhorrest
However strongly justified a belief, a reasonable person must reject it the moment they see it falsified. In the meantime, so long as the belief is both falsifiable and consistent with the world, the believer is perfectly justified in holding it to be as if it were true, i.e. to have assumptions about the world. — Kenosha Kid
:up: That's exactly my position as well. — Pfhorrest
especially if it's opposite or negation is evidenced albeit unproven — Kenosha Kid
Not at all, you can always have evidence for something. A witness testimony is evidence that the accused was at the scene of the crime, for instance. It just isn't proof. Evidence for something is always incomplete; evidence against it is always terminal. That is the whole point of falsification as I understand it.
We're not a million miles apart but the above distinction is the difference. Evidence is not all or nothing. There are many degrees between a completely arbitrary unfalsified belief and a well-founded unfalsified belief. — Kenosha Kid
To be "consistent with the world" just is to be confirmed by observation — Janus
The belief that tool marks are the main sign of artificial rock formations does not derive from falsifying anything but from countless confirmations that those rock formations displaying tool marks are indeed artificial. — Janus
Where our beliefs originate from is not the issue at hand here. — Pfhorrest
Of course it is; beliefs that derive from well-examined repeated experience should inspire more confidence than those which do not. — Janus
I'm not changing the example at all. The belief that the face on Mars is artificial can be checked by examining whether or not tool marks are evident. If they were evident we would have good reason to believe that the face is artificial, if they were not evident we would have no reason to believe the face is artificial. — Janus
I would say instead that there are many degrees between a completely falsified belief and a mostly-unfalsified one. — Pfhorrest
That's not our "P". That's "if Q then P — Pfhorrest
It is not evidence against ~Higgs, since there are potential theories that could explain the same data with more than one particle. But the more signals corresponding to expected decay chains we see (more have been discovered very recently), the better founded the belief that the Higgs mechanism is a good model of reality. — Kenosha Kid
By "mostly unfalsified", I assume you mean falsified with less than 100% certainty. — Kenosha Kid
Third, where evidence against not P is evidence for P. Is the ball under the left cup or the right? Assuming the ball is under one of the two cups, falsifying the theory it is under the left cup is identically evidence for it being under the right cup. There's no distinction between falsifying ~P and verifying P. — Kenosha Kid
LOL — Janus
Why do those observations not equally lend support to the other theories that are just as consistent with them? — Pfhorrest
Like I’ve been saying to Janus over and over, that’s beside the point. Sure, if you can show that not-P implies not-Q, and that Q, then you can show that P, via falsifying not-P. But that’s not what falsification was ever against. — Pfhorrest
Point being that we increase our faith in the model the more it fails to be falsified, without it ever being proven true. And this is not because we have falsified particular known competitors, and certainly not because we've falsified ~Higgs, but because we have narrowed down what a competitor theory can predict that is different to the Higgs model. One doesn't actually have to formulate the competitor theory to falsify it: it is sufficient to know that, as each data point is collected that is consistent with Higgs theory, so long as no data point is collected that rules it out, whatever potential competitor theories might be formulated are either falsified or equally consistent with the data do far, i.e. are *like* the Higgs theory to an increasing extent. — Kenosha Kid
As far as I can tell, nothing will budge Pfhorrest from his position. Nor should anything, in a sense, since the principles in play are not themselves falsifiable. That's irony or necessity, as you like, I suppose. — Srap Tasmaner
Conditional probability is a better fit for both, and if you take a Bayesian approach you still get falsification as a special case — Srap Tasmaner
Is there an earlier post that makes it clearer what sort of feedback would be more useful to you? — Srap Tasmaner
I said exactly that in the OP, and have referred back to or requoted it many times since. — Pfhorrest
I said exactly that in the OP, and have referred back to or requoted it many times since.
— Pfhorrest
You really didn't, and if you had said it you'd be wrong — Srap Tasmaner
Beliefs not yet shown false can still be more or less probable than others, as calculated by methods such as Bayes' theorem. Falsification itself can be considered just an extreme case of showing a belief to have zero probability — Pfhorrest
if you take a Bayesian approach you still get falsification as a special case — Srap Tasmaner
Conditional probability is a whole different animal from material implication, and no adding of "probably" changes that, as David Lewis showed, like, forty years ago. — Srap Tasmaner
if you are frequently observing phenomena that your belief says should be improbable, then that suggests your belief is epistemically improbable (i.e. likely false), — Pfhorrest
Pretty much the whole process you describe is consistent with the approach I advocate, as I already said to Srap when he said similar things earlier. It’s the weeding out of alternatives (even if we haven’t enumerated them yet) that progresses our knowledge, and multiple models that equally well survive that process are not elevated by the process but are merely equal co-survivors of it. — Pfhorrest
Subtract your tentative holding true of untested beliefs, which the above does not require, and we're more or less on the same page. — Kenosha Kid
Can you please elaborate on this? My adding of "probably" to the conditionals under discussion was not meant to be a formal thing at all, but a loose way of phrasing the idea that, as I said in the OP: — Pfhorrest
You’re not showing that confirmation is hidden within falsification, you’re showing that falsification is the thing we need to do instead of confirmation, which is my whole point. — Pfhorrest
"If P then Q, Q, therefore P" is confirmationism.
"If Q then P, Q, therefore P" is falsificationism, because it's equivalent to
"If not-P then not-Q, Q, therefore P". — Pfhorrest
It would make it seem much more like you are arguing in good faith, rather than doubling down on your position if you actually responded to what I am arguing here, (and others have argued) rather than playing a 'tit for tat' game of accusing me of poor reading comprehension, simply because I won't acquiesce to your stipulations. — Janus
tools marks are thought to be a sign strongly suggestive of artificial structures, and that conjecture is confirmed, although not logically proven, by countless examples drawn from experience — Janus
"If P then Q, Q, therefore P" is simply an invalid deduction. Confirmationism is an inductive, not an invalid deductive, thought process. — Janus
the correct formulation for confirmationism is "if Q then P", — Janus
Where e is some evidence, h is some hypothesis, k is some set of background assumptions, and ⊨ is a symbol for entailment, i.e. necessary implication.e HD-confirms h relative to k if and only if h ∧ k ⊨ e and k ⊭ e; — SEP
e confirms h relative to k if and only if e disconfirms ¬h relative to k. — SEP
Things like “P(X | Y)” are often phrased as “the probability of X given Y”, but that means the same thing as “the probability that X is true if Y is true” or “the probability that if Y is true then X is true” or “the probability that Y implies X”. “X given Y” = “X if Y” = “if Y then X” = “X implies Y”. It’s all the same thing. Just wrap a “the probability that” around any of those and you have what “P(X | Y)” means. — Pfhorrest
We shall see that there is no way to interpret a conditional connective so that, with sufficient generality, the probabilities of conditionals will equal the appropriate conditional probabilities. — David Lewis
The bar in ‘pr(H | D)’ is not a connective that turns pairs H, D of propositions into new, conditional propositions, H if D. — Richard Jeffrey
I shall take it as established that the assertability of an ordinary indicative conditional A -> C does indeed go by the conditional subjective probability P(C|A). — David Lewis
That is David Lewis’s “trivialization result”. In proving it, the only assumption needed about ‘if’ was the eqivalence (2) of ‘If X, then if C then D’ with 'If X and C, then D'. — Richard Jeffrey
Things like “P(X | Y)” are often phrased as “the probability of X given Y”, but that means the same thing as “the probability that X is true if Y is true” or “the probability that if Y is true then X is true” or “the probability that Y implies X”. “X given Y” = “X if Y” = “if Y then X” = “X implies Y”. It’s all the same thing. Just wrap a “the probability that” around any of those and you have what “P(X | Y)” means. — Pfhorrest
1. Beliefs are not propositions. Beliefs are states of mind equivalent to a tendency to act as if... — Isaac
Would this mean then that animals have beliefs? — Coben
a) not possible to have a belief which is contrary to the evidence of your senses (beliefs are formed by a neurological process of response to stimuli), and — Isaac
Does this mean that one cannot come to believe things that are counterintuitive: relativity, for example, or that the earth actually revolves around the sun. If we take the latter case that we can find empirical evidence that this is the case, very few people actually do that. Or that color exist outside us. — Coben
-- this leads to the more general criticism that there is no target of the normative claim, it's like telling people that they ought to breathe. — Isaac
What was his normative claim? — Coben
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