There’s a kind of ‘presumptive materialism’ which is typical of a certain style of philosophising. Presumptive materialism will generally not go to any lengths to defend or explicate materialist theory of mind, for instance, but materialism is the only option available when anything that sounds vaguely mystical or religious is ruled out. Hence, it’s presumed to be the case. So the sensible view, the mainstream attitude in secular culture, is that mind must be accounted for in terms of neural processes, because they’re at least in principle explicable in physicalist or scientific terms, or so it’s believed. As I understand it, it’s not so widespread in non-English-speaking philosophy, although there are still examples.

So the sensible view, the mainstream attitude in secular culture, is that mind must be accounted for in terms of neural processes, because they’re at least in principle explicable in physicalist or scientific terms, or so it’s believed. — Wayfarer

What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? You don't need to give a detailed exposition, just a brief outline of how a theory that is not in physicalist terms might look.

that’s what my previous post was addressing.

I can't see any alternative account there. All I see are objections to physicalism based on what I think are fairly simplistic misunderstandings of what the physicalists are saying.

This is an excellent accompaniment Banno. Prime.

Guess what one of the core tenets of my position is?

All I see are objections to physicalism based on what I think are fairly simplistic misunderstandings of what the physicalists are saying. — Janus

I think it’s a cogent argument, supported with quotations from the SEP article on the exact issue. Armstrong was Professor of the department where I did two years of undergrad philosophy and I’m familiar with his ideas. As far as I’m concerned, mine is an original argument which directly challenges the idea of correspondence between mind and brain. If you have a counter, as distinct from an assertion, I’ll adjust my argument accordingly.

What other terms could they be explicable in? How else could you explain mind other than as a function of the brain? — Janus

Assuming the mind is explained as a function of the brain. There's quite a few people who think this has not been the case, at least for consciousness, intentionality and intelligence in general.

If the mind could be fully explained, then we'd have a neural account for propositions, as Banno has pointed out. But we don't have anything like that.

Guess what one of the core tenets of my position is? — creativesoul

After all this time, I still have no idea :-)

If the mind could be fully explained, then we'd have a neural account for propositions, as Banno has pointed out. But we don't have anything like that. — Marchesk

Yes, and I’m arguing that the ‘argument from reason’ is a much better argument than Chalmer’s argument from ‘what it is like to be...’. If the elements of reason can’t be explained in terms of brain-states, then the lynchpin of materialist theory of mind fails; mind is not explicable in terms of what brains do.

Each of my three propositions above is unfalsifiable. And according to you, necessarily true. How do you reconcile the nonsense? — tim wood

They only appear as "unfalsifiable" because you have not defined your terms, "God", "exist". Once you provide clear definitions you'll see what I mean. That "unfalsifiable" could mean something other than true is only the case when terms are ambiguous.

They only appear as "unfalsifiable" because you have not defined your terms, — Metaphysician Undercover

What is it you think "unfalsifiable" means?

The Black Hole Information Paradox is a big issue in physics because information loss would mean processes cannot in principle be time reversible, which is not the case with most of physics. — Marchesk

Thermodynamics teach that information can be lost, is in practice lost all the time, and thus that some events are irreversible. When you burn a book and spread the ashes, it becomes hard to read. When somebody dies, she becomes hard to resuscitate. When a species becomes instinct, it’s hard to recreate it... If tomorrow our planet was swallowed by a black hole, I imagine the planet would melt into some particle soup, and us too. I seriously doubt that we would be able to keep talking about Schopenhauer and Descartes on the forum, unaffected.

Did anyone actually read the article? — Banno

Did anyone understand the article? I'm responding to your examples. If you're examples aren't good representations of what was said in the article, it makes me wonder if you understand what you read, or if you have critically examined what you read in the article.

Any claim made without empirical evidence, which is the same as saying without justification, is a claim about the ontological status of a belief, not the ontological status of real UFOs in real secret military garages.

Any claim made without evidence can be safely understood to actually be saying, "I believe...[the claim]". The claim is about a metaphysical belief, not a metaphysical state of affairs independent of your belief.

Well, not quite, although that's the pop view. Unfalsified theories are not assumed to be true. They are taken as helpful, to greater or lesser extents, and hence the need for Lakatos' research programs to acknowledge the variety of unfalsified theories. For my money, Feyerabend put paid to Poppers program (alliteration unintended...), showing firstly that it did not solve the problem of induction, and secondly that it is not the way science actually works. — Banno

Lakatos' intention, as far as I can tell, is to make falsificationism soften its stance. His notion of science as a research program is falsfication-tolerant - in a sense, the work of accommodating inconsistent obesrvations is delegated to so-called auxiliary hypotheses that are constructed/modified to safeguard what he terms as hard core, non-negotiable assumptions of a scientific theory in question. His goal in formulating such a paradigm for science is to prevent the immediate and total rejection of scientific theories based on inconsistent observations which, as far as I can tell, he considers to be detrimental to scientific progress.

Plus, Lakatos seems to be a man of moderation - he sets a limit to the extent to which auxiliary hypotheses can save a scientific theory. He differentiates between progressive research programs and degenerative research programs. What distinguishes the two is that adjustments made to a theory (new/modified auxiliary hypotheses) are productive in the former but in the case of the latter, all the adjustments manage to accomplish is saving the hard core of a research program from being falsified.

Lakatos' genius duly acknowledged, there's a slight problem with this conception of science as research programs. What's the role of falsificationism at the auxiliary hypotheses level?

Is it Popper-like in the sense if observation is inconsistent with an auxiliary hypothesis then that auxiliary hypothesis is considered falsified and consigned to the garbage heap?

If yes, the fate of the hard core of a scientific theory is ultimately decided by falsficiationism. The introduction of auxiliary hypotheses as some kind of a buffer between a scientific theory (the hard core) and falsificationism is pointless. This situation is like that of a person who's fed up being dependent on his parents and so decides to shift the burden of ensuring his welfare to his sister but, the catch is, his sister depends on his parents. Reminds me of someone... :rofl:

If no, then that means auxiliary theories will need their own auxiliary theories and these, in turn, will need other auxiliary theories and so on and pretty soon we'll have a theory that's grotesquely bloated and beyond manageable.

I'm afraid Lakatos' concept of research programs fails at the task it was set out to do.

Paul Feyerabend seems to want a laissez-faire type of environment for science but then such a state of affairs would fail to distinguish science from non-science. If anything goes then everything is science. Is it? Maybe it is...you never know. I've heard scientists complaining about philosophical interference but this is scientific hegemony at a whole new level.

As for my claim that science is an argumentum ad ignorantiam, you're correct in that scientific theories are described as true best available explanatory frameworks. However, the fact remains that the credibility of scientific theories, in Popper's universe, rests on them not being proven false and that this bears a striking resemblance to a known fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam) should, at the very least, keep us on our toes.

Yes.

A statement is verifiable if it can be shown to be true.
A statement is falsifiable if it can be shown to be false.

Consider statements of the form "there exists an x such that p(x)", those are verifiable but not falsifiable. Why? To verify it, all you need to do is find an example, to falsify it, you need to go out and look at everything ever and evaluate whether there's an x in it such that p(x). "There exists a non-white swan" - go out and find it. You think there isn't one? Have you looked everywhere?

Consider statements of the form "all x are p(x)", those are falsifiable but not verifiable. Why? To falsify it, all you need to do is find an x such that p(x) doesn't hold. To verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x ever and see that it satisfies p(x). "All swans are white" - have you seen every swan?



Those two statement types can be intersected to produce an "all and some" statement. Those go: "for every x there exists a y such that (blah)". Those are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Why? In order to verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x. In order to falsify it, for a particular x, you'd need to show that no such y exists and thereby look at everything ever.

If you're coming at philosophy from the angle that all talk which is relevant to finding things out must be either verifiable or falsifiable; like caricatures of postivists and falsificationalists; it would be surprising if those "all and some" statements play any role in scientific discourse. And they do.

"For every collection of masses there exists a centre of mass"
"For every force there exists a medium which carries it"

And so on. Examples abound. So they play a role in scientific discourse, but (let's grant) that they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable. What kind of role do they play if they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable? The article suggests that they play a regulative one. Regulative how? They inspire scientists, or philosophers, to think about the world differently. The world looks much different if you imagine forces without a carrying medium vs if you imagine that such media are required. They inspire the generation of different hypotheses about the world; and so they play a coordinating role in how we find things out about the world.

Neither verifiable nor falsifiable but shapes how we think about the world - sounds like metaphysics to me!

Someone who really disliked metaphysics playing a role in coordinating scientific conduct might respond to this by; yes yes, such statements play a coordinating role in the generation of hypotheses, but that coordinating role is strictly normative. It tells us what hypotheses scientists and philosophers believe ought to be investigated, not anything about the world - talk about which is confined to falsifiable or verifiable statements. All and some statements are confined to norms of methodology; they're methodological prescriptions not conceptually related to descriptions of reality.

There are two problems with that; the less interesting and easy problem is that there are people who distinguish between the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of all and some statements in their conduct. Someone might believe nature is in general random (descriptive) but believe that scientists ought to treat it as if it is not in circumscribed contexts (prescriptive), so the two have a distinction in practice.

The more interesting and hard problem is that all and some statements don't just inspire research hypotheses, they are conceptually related to research hypotheses and thus inspire research hypotheses. "All and some" statements purport to tell us how stuff works, so we go out looking as if it works that way.

And if all and some statements play this regulative role in science, what stops them playing a similar regulative role in politics and morality? The article looks there too, but I won't.

A statement is verifiable if it can be shown to be true.
A statement is falsifiable if it can be shown to be false. — fdrake

And if it's neither, then the statement is verifiable and falsifiably shown to be nothing other than an unjustified belief, which is to say that it is neither true or false, which is to say that the statement is useless.

The whole point of the claimant omitting "I believe..." at the beginning of the statement is to get the reader to believe, and possibly to fool themselves into thinking that it is more than a just an unjustified belief. But if there is no evidence either way then the lack of evidence is verifiable evidence that the statement is nothing more than an unjustified belief.

Thermodynamics teach that information can be lost, is in practice lost all the time, and thus that some events are irreversible. When you burn a book and spread the ashes, it becomes hard to read. When somebody dies, she becomes hard to resuscitate. When a species becomes instinct, it’s hard to recreate it... If tomorrow our planet was swallowed by a black hole, I imagine the planet would melt into some particle soup, and us too. I seriously doubt that we would be able to keep talking about Schopenhauer and Descartes on the forum, unaffected. — Olivier5

In principle, burning a book is reversible, as is a corpse. It's just not feasible for us to do it. But according to the physics, everything you mentioned could be reversed. The information for doing so is conserved in the fire, ashes, decaying body and so on. The environment conserves the information.

Hawking demonstrated that black holes seem to be different. When they evaporate, the information to recover what fell into the black hole is lost. However, progress has been made on how that might not actually be the case. The radiation left over after the evaporation might contain the information, provided one has the right sort of theory for that to be the case.

What is it you think "unfalsifiable" means? — Banno

I think it means exactly what it looks like it means, not possible to demonstrate the falsity of. The point is that the common epistemological usage of this term is unacceptable because propositions are asserted to be unfalsifiable without due justification. Justification requires a defining of the terms, and a logical demonstration, (empirical demonstration in this case being out of the question). If justification is not required, then "unfalsifiable" has no epistemological import and it's application is arbitrary and subjective. It has become a cop-out term, employed in a lazy attempt to avoid logical rigor. The way it is employed, its meaning is basically 'I don't understand the ontological concepts involved here, therefore I designate the proposition as unfalsifiable'. Consider timwoods examples.

Unless there are standards as to what constitutes "justifiably unfalsifiable" the concept ought not be given epistemological status. And if we apply the necessary rigor (well-defined terms), I believe we'll find what I stated, "unfalsifiable" means impossible to be falsified, therefore necessarily true. Otherwise "unfalsifiable" has no objective status, meaning 'I personally, or we as a group, have not the capacity to falsify this (which is in fact falsifiable) due to the deficiencies of our capacities.

Consider statements of the form "there exists an x such that p(x)", those are verifiable but not falsifiable. Why? To verify it, all you need to do is find an example, to falsify it, you need to go out and look at everything ever and evaluate whether there's an x in it such that p(x). "There exists a non-white swan" - go out and find it. You think there isn't one? Have you looked everywhere? — fdrake

Thanks fdrake for the explanation. Notice that there is nothing here to give "unfalsifiable" any real status. So long as we continue to observe every instance of x with an open mind, such that we continue to allow for the possibility that it might be falsified, there is no assertion of "unfalsifiable". Therefore we may leave open the question of whether "there exists a non-white swan", and maintain that the proposition "all swans are white" is still falsifiable.

The appearance of "unfalsifiable" is just a symptom of ill-definition. If we define "swan" so as to exclude the possibility of a non-white swan, we exclude the possibility of the proposition "there exists an x such that p(x)", as an invalid (contradictory) proposition. Such a creature could not be a swan by that definition. But Banno would reject this as "essentialism", not realizing the damage which rejecting essentialism does to the human capacity for deductive logic, by allowing ill-definition and its consequent assertion, "unfalsifiable". "Unfalsifiable" which really means I am certain that we will not find an off-coloured swan, but I'm not certain enough to define "swan" in that way, really just allows for uncertainty to gain a foothold in epistemology. The alternative, to maintain that "there exists an x such that p(x)", has the status of falsifiable, until we are satisfied that it is a proven fact, then define "p" in this way, such that it is an empirical certainty, thereby avoiding the unnecessary middle position of "unfalsifiable", provides a much more reasonable epistemology.

Consider statements of the form "there exists an x such that p(x)", those are verifiable but not falsifiable. Why? To verify it, all you need to do is find an example, to falsify it, you need to go out and look at everything ever and evaluate whether there's an x in it such that p(x). "There exists a non-white swan" - go out and find it. You think there isn't one? Have you looked everywhere? — fdrake

I wouldnt need to look everywhere, only where swans live, or in its genetic code where there would be the potential for non- white feathers to be expressed, just as one might have the code for brown eyes in their genes even though they have blue eyes.

Then there is the possibility of defining swans as all being white, and non-white "swans" aren't actually swans at all.

I wouldnt need to look everywhere, only where swans live, or in its genetic code where there would be the potential for non- white feathers to be expressed, just as one might have the code for brown eyes in their genes even though they have blue eyes. — Harry Hindu

Yes. The quantifiers need some domain associated with them. The original article goes some way to specifying the kind of domains they're talking about.

They only appear as "unfalsifiable" because you have not defined your terms, "God", "exist". Once you provide clear definitions you'll see what I mean. That "unfalsifiable" could mean something other than true is only the case when terms are ambiguous. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is pretty interesting and I'm still wrapping my brain around it. It strikes me that what seems simple, here, isn't. I am very interested in how you define unfalsifiable, or how you might describe the process of deciding a proposition is unfalsifiable.

1) It appears you might hold that all propositions P renderable as, "All/some S are/are not P," S and P being well-defined(?) are either true or false. And this seems right, granted the means for testing which are available. Hmm. (Let's for the moment suppose that not-true and false are the same thing.)

But this implies that no proposition is decidable prior to test. Which further implies that for all propositions for which no appropriate test is available, truth or falsity is indeterminable/undecidable.

I have to stop here for a bit though unfinished, but will post because so far it seems provocative.

In principle, burning a book is reversible — Marchesk

Like a rotten corpse can be brought back to life, in principle. All you have to do is convince the bacteria eating it to work backward in time, deproliferate (I suppose mitosis is reversible, in principle) and reconstruct the dead body the way they found it when it died.

In principle. But in reality, it never ever happens, because the odds are beyond minuscule. Just like you rarely see bullets ejected by a wounded body right back into the hole of a handgun canon, though it is possible, in principle.

I am very interested in how you define unfalsifiable, or how you might describe the process of deciding a proposition is unfalsifiable. — tim wood

If I might interject, Popper's original formulation was simply that an empirical hypothesis is one that can be overturned by evidence or observation. He gave two examples of hypotheses, or sets of hypotheses, that could not be falsified, namely, marxism and freudianism. Conversely, Einstein's theory of relativity was confirmed by observation of stellar paralax in 1919. Had those results not been obtained, then the theory would have been falsified - which of course it has never been, but it could have been in principle, hence it's an empirical theory.

He gave two examples of hypotheses, or sets of hypotheses, that could not be falsified, namely, marxism and freudianism. Conversely, Einstein's theory of relativity was confirmed by observation of stellar paralax in 1919. — Wayfarer

You do see how all of this is not clear, yes? The status of Marxism or Freudianism each depends on definition(s). And as it happens, the 1919 "confirmation" by measuring Mercury's precession was at the limit of the sensitivity of the devices as used and within their margin of error - by luck and narrow margin. Non-confirmation in that effort would have meant nothing but non-confirmation.

On MU's construction, it would appear there are many fewer true propositions than at least I thought there were. "All mules have four legs," if unfalsifiable, would be necessarily true. But it is falsifiable, so we must retreat to, "Some mules have four legs," or most anyway. And falsifiable, it seems, ought to include all kinds. On the other hand, any proposition that is unfalsifiable becomes true, which seems counter-intuitive

The requirement for being unfalsifiable, then, becomes a hammer of destruction against many things taken for true. The problem is whether this is, or is not, in its own way remarkable. And clearly one must take care in defining, lest one define into existence something that does not exist.

At the moment it seems right to me to argue v. @Metaphysician Undercover that unfalsifiability does not necessarily establish truth, but rather the grounds for a possibility of truth.
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In my understanding the point of falsifiability is to distinguish empirical hypotheses; if a proposition can’t be falsified by observation or evidence, then it’s not an empirical proposition. This has flared up in physics in respect of string theory and the multiverse; one side is arguing that these theories are not falsifiable in principle, so, not empirical, so, not really science; the other side is accusing those critics of being popperazi.

They only appear as "unfalsifiable" because you have not defined your terms, "God", "exist". Once you provide clear definitions you'll see what I mean. That "unfalsifiable" could mean something other than true is only the case when terms are ambiguous. — Metaphysician Undercover

Which is akin to what I've been saying. The more specific we are with our definitions, the more falsifiable those definitions are. To assert the existence of some thing that contradicts the category you are defining the thing as (ie there are planets smaller than mercury that exist) either means that we adjust the definition of the category, or put the thing in a whole new category. The latter occurred when we categorized Pluto as a dwarf planet, instead of a planet.

Well done.

Watkin's article is in the same vein as Lakatos, in that Popper's demarcation criterion was seen to rule out far too much as unscientific. Watkins is drawing attention to the unscientific nature of materialism, field theories, and most tellingly, conservation laws.

Lakatos' method of research programs looks itself much like an ad hoc attempt to save Popper's demarcation from falsification. Scientists do not wok in this way. That's the criticism from Feyerabend in a nutshell, and that's were treating science as distinct from other discipline because of its method comes apart.

What we are left with is replacing method with a set of ethical principles, which include things such as being open to revision of one's ideas, being clear about one's assumptions, and so on.

Falsification fails to demarcate science from non-science both because scientists make use of non-falsifiable theories (as Watkins shows) and because falsification fails to solve the problem of induction. Nevertheless the relation between the logical structure of theories, as described by Popper and Watkins, is well worth considering.

In my understanding the point of falsifiability is to distinguish empirical hypotheses; if a proposition can’t be falsified by observation or evidence, then it’s not an empirical proposition. This has flared up in physics in respect of string theory and the multiverse; one side is arguing that these theories are not falsifiable in principle, so, not empirical, so, not really science; the other side is accusing those critics of being popperazi. — Wayfarer

The interesting thing is that Popper argued that metaphysical speculations or propositions play an ineliminable role in science. Even though they are not verifiable or falsifiable, they may lead to other hypotheses which are falsifiable. String Theory may be an example, so the so-called popperazi would not be following their master in condemning it.

Yes, that's it. The paper gives a clear account of what theories are to be counted as metaphysical and what are not, based on their logical structure. Metaphysical here means something akin to unfalsifiable, even as Popper used the term. Watkins is attempting to deal with the same issues as did Feyerabend and Lakatos, but doing so without dramatically reformulating Popper's account. He wants his haunted universe statements to take on much the same role as the core theories of Lakatos' research programs. The outcome is much the same, in that they show that science cannot be differentiated form non-science by method alone.