The more I think about it, the more I think your behavior here is only a hair's breadth away from trolling.

Waffle, I think you're missing Kitoba's point -- you're aggressively agreeing with him.

No, I think he's misrepresenting things in order to support an idea of his.

This was intended as a philosophy discussion --which happens to be my field. Part of my point is that invalid philosophical claims are being made here that are not made valid just because they are inspired by valid science.

Although you seem somewhat dismissive of the entire branch of study, philosophy has its own strengths and its own standards.



This seems to me to be an incoherent statement, assuming we're both defining "testable" as "empirically verifiable" or in other words as "in agreement with the results of observations." To quote Wikipedia:





We both agree that those three statements are all distortions of science --I don't in any way claim them to be representative of actual science. But I do find them implied by statements of yours such as "Australopithecus is an extinct hominid. That is not going to change. It is a hominid that lived between four and two million years ago. That is not going to change. It and humanity share an ancestor. That is a cold, hard fact and is not going to change. Ever."

That's an absolute statement. If you don't mean it as an absolute statement, you should make your disclaimers clear. If you do mean it as an absolute statement, then you're going beyond what we've all just agreed are the boundaries of undistorted science.


Being philosophically exact often requires an aggressive line of questioning. However, the end goal is to illuminate, not to annoy, even if it doesn't always seem so. Socrates himself was basically executed on the charge of trolling.

I'm not asking any questions I feel are unnecessary or claiming positions I don't hold, and I'm trying to be respectful. And I'd like to mention again my personal fondness for you, a fondness undiminished by being on opposite sides of this issue. I have only positive feelings about all currently active sluggy.net posters.

Let me ask you this, take any of those points about A. above and tell me how far you can reasonably expect any of them to change.

I agree when with drachefly
But when you say
I don't think you've taken the step-back that my caveats have suggested.

Lets try to simplify this a little. Shall we look just at point 1.

1. Every valid truth is empirically testable (this is provably self-inconsistent).

For a given value of valid; yes, though we may currently lack the means to test it or the understanding to comprehend the results. Let's give the value of valid as: Something which can be observed and/or measured. What part of this statement requires belief? Please give an example.

More precisely, when discussing science (and engineering), what is a truth? Are we using this as a synonym for fact? For an observation? For a conclusion? For a hypothesis? For all of them at once?

One of the first things an undergraduate physics student learns is precision in language. A speaker may be described as an energetic or dynamic speaker, but the meaning is roughly the same. Another observer may describe the same speaker as forceful. While not quite as much of a synonym as the others, the meaning is quite similar. In physics, these terms have very definite, quite distinct meanings. Likewise, the terms observation, conclusion, hypothesis and theory have very definite meanings. The only actual scientific meaning for truth that I am aware of sidles into things from mathematics and Boolean logic.

Philosophers also believe in being precise about language, and in that spirit, there's a world of difference between "I don't expect X to change" and "X cannot change." I don't expect that series of facts to change, but it's entirely possible that Australopithecus could be reclassified, that the dates could be corrected, that the lineage might be revised, etc. All those kinds of changes can, do and have happened. It has often happened that very good scientists have been wrong about things they were very sure about --that's what we call scientific progress.



In philosophy, there are logical truths, which are statements incapable of being false, determinate contingent truths, which are statements that are capable of being false, but which have been determined to be true in a way that leaves no room for doubt, and axioms, which are statements that are neither logical truths nor determinate contingent truths, but that are assumed true as the starting point for all further investigations.

The way you have used the word "fact" has lead me to suspect you mean it to imply "determinate contingent truth", but it doesn't seem like all the facts you have cited can be legitimately be described that way.

From my point of view, it seems like you aren't eager to issue the kinds of minor caveats about your statements that would bring them in line with what can actually be empirically established. I'd like to challenge you to ask yourself if that's because, at some level, you'd like to believe that science can provide you absolute security and stability of beliefs.



OK, if we substitute that definition for "valid", we rewrite the sentence as "Something which can be observed or measured can be empirically tested", which is trivially true, because it's basically a tautology, and thus uncontroversial. But what is left unanswered is whether or not you think it is possible to make meaningful true statements about the world that can't be verified by observation or measurement.

Lets turn it around. Can you give examples of what you think are meaningful true statements about the world that can't be observed or measured?

"All statements (with the exception of this one) that are meaningful and true can be verified through observation and measurement" is a meaningful statement, and could potentially be a true statement, but it isn't itself empirical.

"The universe obeys unalterable laws of nature" is meaningful, and potentially true, but not verifiable in its strong form. "The universe appears to obey unalterable laws of nature" would be the verifiable form. The strong version may be suggested by the weak version, and the strong version might very well be true, but the truth of the strong version is not empirically verifiable.

Since you asked for my opinion, I consider "God exists" to be meaningful statement, and a true statement, but it isn't one that we generally consider as empirically verifiable--although it isn't a great example since we don't agree on the possibility of it being both meaningful and true.

As it turns out, it is actually a logical truth that there must be at least one meaningful true statement about the world that cannot be empirically verified, because the converse is logically incoherent.

Of course it is. The very act of taking any given statement which is considered meaningful and true and determining if it is empirical is in itself placing measurable constraints on this statement. If all statements examined are meaningful, true and measurable then this statement continues to be true.Again with the 'potentially true'? Both statements within the context of human perception should read: The universe should be considered to obey unalterable laws of nature to the point where you might as well say "The universe obeys unalterable laws of nature" until evidence suggests otherwise.

Of course I'm not sure what you mean by "laws of nature"

You could be referring to physics which is constantly altered. In this case the statement is quite simply not true.If you consider this to be meaningful and true for more than your own personal reference you must also consider all other religions to be meaningful and true including (as you consider it a belief) Atheism. This is of course paradoxical and absurd. If however you consider it meaningful and true for you personal reference only, it has no bearing beyond your personal reference.I'm afraid you might need to explain this one in a bit more depth.

Personally, I don't expect any of the above to change, but it's not impossible that any presumed extinct creature might survive in some suitable out-of-the-way place; like Conan Doyle's Lost World. While this is somewhat unlikely, I would point out that this did happen to the coelacanth.



"If Einstein had died in his cradle, then relativity would have been discovered twenty years later." It's a meaningful statement, and for all I know it could be true, but I can't see how it can possibly be measurable. There's any number of statements about what would have happened which suffer from the same problem.



Which is a different statement.



I see physics as an attempt to discover the laws under which the universe actually works; the laws as described by physics are merely a current best guess at the actual, underlying rules.



I feel that I should point out that Kitoba's original statement does not imply that any particular religion is true - it merely implies the existence of a certain being. If I say that James exists, this does not imply that any random statement that you make about James (including 'James does not exist') is equally true - as you point out, that would be paradoxical and absurd.

Until you get to religions whose conceptions of the divine are incompatible with the Judeo-Christian worldview. Shinto says that there are spirits residing in rocks, trees, mountains, rivers, and all sorts of natural objects. Chinese ancestor worship says that my ancestors' souls have split in three, with each part residing, respectively, in the grave, the household ancestral tablet, and an afterlife which is similar enough to human reality that I need to send them money every so often. Hinduism believes in a whole pantheon of deities. Buddhism says the endpoint of human spiritual growth is to cease to exist.

James may or may not exist. But if James doesn't acknowledge the existence of Steve, may Steve also exist?

This statement is not meaningful and true. In fact it is meaningful because it cannot be proven. If it could it would not be meaningful.

Yes and the one which is to be considered meaningful and true.

Physics is the way we measure and observe these laws thus the part which we must concern ourselves with.

The notion of the universe obeying a set of rules is nearly tautological. Whatever makes things happen, in fact does that. That's how things work, period. If anything else happened, that would simply always have been a part of the fixed set of rules.

The interesting part is that this set of rules appears to be short.

That the rules appear to be time independent is also interesting. It is not absolutely certain that this is exactly the case - scientists who check it do not face general derision.