🚀 go-pugleaf

fwp@CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) writes:
>Marc A. Belanger <3914MABE@vm1.ulaval.ca> says:

>>          Moreover, can anyone tell me of any prediction made by maths
>>(or math) or by sciences having to cope with complex systems or non-
>>linear equations?

Before falsifiability replaced it, one of the favorites (if not "the"
favorite) was verificationism. That is, if a experiment was performed
and the prediction did come true, then it was said to "verify" the
theory. The problem is one of induction. Just because something
happened N times doesn't really mean it'll keep happening. So
verification was replaced by confirmation; that is the experiment
confirmed the theory. But the real problem still exists since
it's still possible under some circumstances for some experiment
to fail to confirm the theory and besides all this you might
have to perform an infinite number of experiments to have
100% faith that the theory is true. So the best idea that anyone
could produce seems to be Popper and his falsificationism.

Any theory must be falsifiable in order to be scientific. If
anyone claims that witches exist, they can make the theory
scientific (not believable or provably true) by simply
telling us how it would be possible for us to devise a test
to see if witches don't exist. If it's full of circular
evasions (like Marxism or Freudianism according to Popper)
then it can't be falsified.

Even in math it's impossible to prove the simplest things.
For example; is addition commutative i.e. does x+y=y+x
for any two integers?  In order to prove this you'd have
to try every pair of integers and it would take until the
end of the universe and beyond.

Falsificationism is the easiest way out since it may provide
a test to choose between alternatives.

--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925