🚀 go-pugleaf

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.