🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct6.180613.43641@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>In article <1992Oct05.202904.62326@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>> In article <1992Oct3.105750.43545@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>>>     One of the conditions for a felicitous *assertion* is that the
>>>speaker have evidence for its truth at the time of utterance. 
>>>Since a testable, non-obvious and therefore non-trivial scientific
>>>hypothesis is supported or falsified or revised for years after it
>>>is stated, it seems to me that a scientific hypothesis cannot be an
>>>assertion.  This works out empirically: if the hearer of an
>>>assertion later discovers a single counter-example, (s)he concludes
>>>that the assertion was false.
>> 
>> Not really.  If I assert, "I saw the man come in.  He was tall, thin,
>> brown-haired, wore glasses, and smoking a cigar.", and it turns out his hair
>> is actually black instead of brown, you don't necessarily conclude that my
>> assertion was "false".  It *do* conclude that it was not correct in every
>> detail.
>> 
>> Scientific hypotheses are like this; they have a lot of detail, and some of
>> the detail can be wrong without falsifying the assertion as a whole.
>
>I disagree on the ground of elementary logic: the assertion you give
>here is a simple conjunction of six propositions; the falsity of any
>one of them makes the conjunction false.
>
>Since I am claiming that scientific hypotheses are not assertions, I
>do not disagree with what you say about scientific hypotheses.

I disagree with the details of your taxonomy of human utterances.  At the
very least, you are using "assertion" in a different way from its common
usage.