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 — tim wood

Why should unfalsifiable propositions be considered to be true, as opposed to possibly true or false, or neither true nor false? I'm not seeing the reasoning.

As to the "all mules have four legs", why "must [we] retreat to, "Some mules have four legs," or most anyway?" The proposition is falsifiable, from which it does not follow that it is falsified, or even that it ever will be falsified. Of course it may have already been falsified, in which case we would have to retreat to the position ""Some mules have four legs," or most anyway." , where the retreat is on account of it being falsified, not on account of it merely being falsifiable.

Cheers.

The outcome is much the same, in that they show that science cannot be differentiated form non-science by method alone. — Banno

The practice of science, insofar as it involves unfalsifiable speculations or propositions cannot be differentiated from other practices by method alone, but it still seems right that scientific hypotheses, if those are defined as being falsifiable, can be differentiated from non-scientific hypotheses. The upshot then would be that the practice of science involves both scientific and non-scientific hypotheses (or speculations or propositions). Popper acknowledges this.

Why should unfalsifiable propositions be considered to be true, as opposed to possibly true or false, or neither true nor false? I'm not seeing the reasoning. — Janus

Yeah. I agree. I think we can put it down to a few folk not being familiar with Popper's account.

The upshot then would be that the practice of science involves both scientific and non-scientific hypotheses — Janus

SO, to put on Feyerabend's hat, astrology is a science in so far as it makes falsifiable claims; that the moon is in Sagittarius implies trouble for fish, perhaps leading to a falsifiable claim that all fish prices will drop, or some such.

I suspect such demarcation criteria will ultimately fail. The Watkins article goes towards showing why. It places some clearly scientific proposals, such as conservation laws, on the wrong side of the demarcation.

As far as I’m concerned, mine is an original argument which directly challenges the idea of correspondence between mind and brain. — Wayfarer

Many years ago I devised an argument that the mind could not be identical with the brain. It went something like this:

If both true and false propositions were really nothing but neural configurations then since they are semantically distinguishable they ought to be neurologically distinguishable.

I developed this argument into other variants involving logically valid and invalid arguments, and the way in which the purported conditioning of rational thought by evolution ought to undermine our confidence in it and so on.

I have come to think that these kinds of arguments are quite naive. They are neither verifiable or falsifiable, but unlike the unfalsifiable "auxilliary" hypotheses involved in the practice of science, they don't seem to be useful either, because they don't seem capable of leading to any falsifiable hypotheses.

I'm fine with astrology being a science insofar as it makes falsifiable claims. However if most of its claims are falsified, then it's not a very effective science.

I would like to note, though, that most of its claims regarding personality types, as opposed to perhaps its claims about coming events, are not falsifiable, or at least not definitively so, since they rely on judgements of character which are subjective.

I'm fine with astrology being a science... — Janus

I'm not so keen. I wonder if we can do better by demarcating in terms of ethical principles. IF an astrologer were willing to change their predictions in the face of an analysis of their results, we might make some progress in moving astrology into the sciences.

Yes, I agree. A true :wink: scientist should be keen to falsify their predictions.

Sure, but these are issues for scientists in general and physicists in particular. Most of us are neither.

This is the issue that Davidson addresses with anomalous monism.

I choose to raise my arm and the darn thing goes up, as Searle points out; undeniably there is a causal link between mind and body, and in both directions. Hence, Monism. Yet no strict laws can set the link between belief and action. Hence, the causes are anomalous.

A true :wink: scientist... — Janus

Better, a good scientist - and I mean that as an ethical judgement.

:up: I do agree with you re the ethics of enquiry.

I have come to think that these kinds of arguments are quite naive. — Janus

I don't think they are at all. They're counter to the principle physicalist and materialist theories of mind. Armstrong's work, whose magnum opus is Materialist Theory of Mind, 'involved identifying beliefs and desires with states of the brain'. The identification of the mind with the brain is the lynchpin of all materialism, take that out and the whole structure collapses.

(By the way, Popper co-authored a book with Sir John Eccles in defense of dualism, 'The Self and its Brain'.)

So there's nothing naive about the kind of argument I'm proposing. There's the whole family of 'arguments from reason', which argue that logical necessity can't be reduced to physical causality without undermining reason itself. Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism falls under this umbrella. They're all serious arguments. So maybe you just dismiss them, because they're not amenable to your own 'presumptive materialism'. Better just to declare them 'unfalsifiable', when really those criteria aren't essential to arguments of this kind.

I choose to raise my arm and the darn thing goes up, — Banno

That style of argument reduces a very subtle issue to a simplistic truism. It's like Moore's 'here is my hand', or, for that matter, 'Stove's Gem' - sweeping, simplistic declarations which want to sweep the table clean, without really indicating any real idea of what is at stake.

In any case, Davidson also illustrates what I mean by 'presumptive materialism'. It's the view that, as dualist philosophies of mind are invariably associated with acceptance of the notion of immaterial reals, then they have to be rejected as matter of principle, meaning that whatever view you take, it must presume that physicalism is basically correct. Which everyone of his generation and position would presume to be the case.

But would you go so far as to agree that science is about conduct, not method? That Demarcation is not in a process but an attitude?

He wants his haunted universe statements to take on much the same role as the core theories of Lakatos' research programs. — Banno

I drew that comparison too, though I saw a hole in the account.

The hole is: using the "all and some" logical form for the role that "research hard cores" play in Lakatos is that precisely how an "all and some" statement could be rejected needs a theory.

A naive account of falsificationalism might have that the central components of a research program can be defended from potentially refuting evidence by adopting auxiliary hypotheses in the following way; if the research program's central assumptions are A, and the refuting evidence claims not A but can be interpreted as not A or B, B can then be added to the research program's hypotheses provisionally to defend A from falsification. A and B are both falsifiable in that account, and the study showing not A has a modus tollens impact on the research program. If the central hypothesis is an all and some statement, it's not falsifiable, so no candidate study could have the same modus tollens impact on it. I'm not saying that it couldn't be refuted, I'm saying that the model of refutation modus tollens impact provides in naive falsificationalism doesn't work on central components of a research program that contains "all and some" statements - something else is needed.

I imagine that comes down to spelling out a sense of conceptual entailment - an attempt to answer the questions.

(1) From the "normal science" side: how does an all and some statement suggest/generate falsifiable (or verifiable) research hypotheses?
(2) From the "paradigm shift" side: how does evidence or theory refute an "all or some" statement?

The interesting thing is that Popper argued that metaphysical speculations or propositions play an ineliminable role in science. — Janus

By some called presuppositions of which some are relative and some absolute. Here, sec. 2.2.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood/

That style of argument reduces a very subtle issue to a simplistic truism. It's like Moore's 'here is my hand', or, for that matter, 'Stove's Gem' - sweeping, simplistic declarations which want to sweep the table clean, without really indicating any real idea of what is at stake. — Wayfarer

Yes! Brilliant, aren't they! They work because they change the whole picture, like seeing the rabbit as a duck, or better, like seeing that you can choose to see either the rabbit or the duck.

So to the present example, any form of dualism faces the insurmountable obstacle of explaining causality across the great divide. Hence, Monism.

No, they're not 'brilliant'. They're procrustean.

any form of dualism faces the insurmountable obstacle of explaining causality across the great divide. — Banno

It's not difficult at all. Look around you and right in front of you. All the devices and inventions you see, including, most notably, the device you're using to create your argument, are the inventions of the human mind. The human mind can peer into the realm of the not-yet-existent, the potentially-possible, which, by definition, does not exist, and pull things out of it. It uses mathematics and reason to discover properties of matter which could never be found by mere sensible experience. So humans are inhabitans of that dual realm of physical and mental throughout their existence. Which is something similar to what Popper argued for.

There's no way to account for or predict these abilities on the basis of physics. Hence, dualism. But it's very easy to deny in a culture where matter~energy now occupy the role previously assigned to the divine intellect.

The identification of the mind with the brain is the lynchpin of all materialism, take that out and the whole structure collapses. — Wayfarer

If the mind is a function of the physical em-brained body or embodied brain then mental and physical processes and activities will require different kinds of descriptions and accounts. This fact does nothing to support the idea that there is anything other than one basic kind of substance so

By the way, Popper co-authored a book with Sir John Eccles in defense of dualism, 'The Self and its Brain'. — Wayfarer

Popper was not defending metaphysical dualism, even though he may be considered to be a mind/body dualist, a methodological dualist (as we all really are) on account of his differentiation between physical and mental descriptions.

(1) From the "normal science" side: how does an all and some statement suggest/generate falsifiable (or verifiable) research hypotheses? — fdrake

Isn't this dealt with in the article - being the topic of Section VII? Or have I misunderstood you?

(2) From the "paradigm shift" side: how does evidence or theory refute an "all or some" statement? — fdrake

In Lakatos' formulation, and without checking his papers, a research program is never utterly falsified, it just becomes so mired in ad hoc hypotheses that progress (a loaded term) becomes impossible, and researchers move on to more productive areas.

...nothing in that rules out the mental as an outcome of the physical. Indeed, you did not address the causal link between mind and body.

Popper was not defending metaphysical dualism, even though he may be considered to be a mind/body dualist, a methodological dualist (as we all really are) on account of his differentiation between physical and mental descriptions. — Janus

Yes.

Different ways of articulating the same thing, such that they have little in common.

There's no way to account for or predict these abilities on the basis of physics. — Wayfarer

Yes, there is. Read Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe.

https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=kauffman+at+home+in+the+universe&qid=1609370074&sr=8-1

But would you go so far as to agree that science is about conduct, not method? That Demarcation is not in a process but an attitude? — Banno

Yes, that sounds about right.

//actually reading more into Davidson, mental-physical correlation is discussed, and rejected, by him, while still maintaining a materialist theory of mind (hence 'anomalous monism'). I will try and find time to read more about him as there's lot in it.//

There's a critique of Davidson by Feser here which concludes:

In any event, the fact remains that Davidson’s position, like all forms of materialism, ultimately derives whatever strength it has from the false supposition that, realistically, “there is no alternative” to materialism (or physicalism, or naturalism) if one rejects modern forms of dualism.

i.e. exactly what I am describing as 'presumptive materialism'.

Kauffman's thesis is that life and mind are purely physical processes that emerge once the system becomes complex enough. He explicitly rules out any supernatural or designing intelligence at work.

From Amazon's description of the book:

We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.*

*Underlining and emphases mine.

have the book, since 1996. But I found it too focussed on biology and didn't really take to it. I've since encountered quite a few of Kaufman's articles and interviews, and I *don't* regard him as a philosophical materialist. Note the phrase at the end of that excerpt:

If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.

That is something none of the forms of materialism that I'm criticizing would dare admit as it's plainly teleological. It sounds a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins.

Note this exchange between Kaufmann and John Horgan:

Horgan: Have you read Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos? If so, are you sympathetic toward his critique of evolutionary theory in particular and science in general?

Kauffman: Loved his book. He asks most of the right questions, and I so wrote him. But I don't think he has ideas of answers. Nagel's "purposeless teleology" may rest on an unrecognized anti-entropic process in the universe, in which above level of atoms, as complexity increases, e.g. molecules, grains of dust to minerals, the space of possibilities becomes ever vaster, and more sparsely populated in non-repeating ways. Maybe the universe, life, humanity and culture become complex because this anti-entropic process says "THEY CAN" as in the ergodic hypothesis in statistical mechanics, which is not causal. In short, why did life, universe and economy become complex? We need accelerating expansion of universe for free energy and "tuned constants" but those are necessary, not sufficient. The anti-entropic process may be, with others, sufficient. I am writing a new book about this.

That new book is A World Beyond Physics:

Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere.

Hence - not physicalist. Science itself has evolved beyond materialism, 1960's academic philosophy is about 100 years behind.

I believe we'll find what I stated, "unfalsifiable" means impossible to be falsified, therefore necessarily true. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're forgetting the other half of the picture. If the proposition is also unverifiable, then why should we believe it is true?

As the article pointed out there are kinds of propositions which are unverifiable: "all x are Y", but falsifiable, and there are other kinds of propositions which are unfalsifiable: "some x are Y", but verifiable. In the latter case your position would entail that it is necessarily true that some x are Y, but that is nonsense; we could not know that until and unless it had been verified.