"Mike Dubbeld" wrote in message ...
"Richard Alexander" wrote in message
om...
Al Klein wrote in message
. ..

[snip]

The definition of "scientific" doesn't include "testable".

I think we should at least settle this question; Can an hypothesis,
theory, principle, claim or statement be scientific if it is not
testable?

The Big Bang can't be re-created/duplicated but there are indirect ways
to test it.

You should not reference specific examples so soon, as it is likely to
skew your thinking. One should go from principle to application;
otherwise, I might call any story, "scientific," after the fact.

Many things don't fit anything except
statistics/probability. There you have to go by the weight of the
evidence. The notion of 'testable' is not a binary yes or no answer. It
may be testable with a certain percent confidence level or have a
certain correlation coefficient. On the other hand, you could plot
bubble gum sales as a function of meteors seen in the southern
hemisphere and might find a pretty good correlation......

The term "testable" means that any random person who correctly
performs the experiment would get similar (generally within 10%)
results, that is, the results are universally repeatable. If plots of
bubble gum sales as a function of meteors correlates testably, that
would be an amazing coincidence!

This gets
into sample size etc fast. Testable to how many places past the decimal
point?

In something called Late-Post-Modern-Non-Classical-Foundationalism
(LPMNCF) a hypothesis or theory is innocent until proven guilty/is true
if there appears to be no evidence and until such time as it is found
not to be true.

I would have a difficult time accepting such a protocol, and you
should, too. If I say, "There are little faeries who hide from
people's sight, but who on occasion hide people's keys at night," you
probably could not find the statement untrue. That is partly because
the statement is untestable.

Just about everything you know is based on this idea. Instead of a
scientific 'causal explanation' like F = MA with a 'Covering Law' LPMNCF
explanations are based on 'reasons explanations.' Science is the only
enterprise on the planet that is NOT required to provide reasons
explanations. All other knowledge is based on this. Smith is not found
guilty of murdering Jones by an equation. There may be circumstantial
evidence based on scientific knowledge like ballistics and fingerprints
that add up to weight of evidence one way or another but the jury is
going to want more than that in many cases - they want to know Smith's
motivation/reasons for killing Jones.

As it happens, the first class I took on Logic and Critical Thinking
discussed the concept of "innocent until proven guilty," commonly used
in courts of law. That we would discuss such a subject is not unusual,
considering that the class I took was a required class for paralegal
majors. But, what we learned is that "innocent until proven guilty" is
one of the admitted departures from pure logic that the legal system
uses. "Innocent until proven guilty" is not a logical way to find
guilt or innocence, but our legal system uses it to bias the results
in favor of protecting potentially-innocent accused.

When you tell someone that is a chair, - if it half way looks like it
might be, chances are your idea will be accepted and the matter ended.
You do not need to say the photons bouncing off the chair formed an
image on the retina of my eye blah blah blah. LPMNCF is a response to
the failure of Logical Positivism as a be all end all. Most things do
not have scientific causal explanations.

I agree with your last sentence; "Most things do not have scientific
causal explanations." However, that does not answer the question, "Is
a concept scientific..."

Things that make an event
historical for instance do so because they are one-time events. They can
not be empirically studied.

This was also addressed in my logic class. It may come as a shock to
the post-moderns, but not everything is or can be scientific.
Historical events are--surprise!--History, not Science, and History is
distinct from Science. If the post-moderns had their way, universities
would have one department--Science--and everything that could take
place on campus would be specializations of that one department. It
isn't just the Humanities Department that complains of this mind-set;
some scientists also complain about the mis-guided attempt by some
people to see science as the only truth, or to turn everything into
science. It has been suggested that Science is a victim of its own
success.

You can not dress up a bunch of short guys
with 3-cornered hats that like to stick their hands in their vest and
conduct 'Battles of Waterloo.' Or the 2002 State of the Union address -
one time events. Does that make one-time events not possible to be
studied empirically? If you smoke a cigarette the smoke and ashes can
not be put back into tobacco and paper again. So while smoking similar
cigarettes is testable, repeated testing of a single cigarette is not.

Indeed, one-time events are neither scientific nor testable, another
point made in my first class on Logic and Critical Thinking.

LPMNCF is based on a pyramid structure. If a few blocks are defective
the whole pyramid does not fall down.

But, maybe they should. The search for truth should be rigorous. We
should not be looking for survivers; we should be trying to kill them.
The "acid test" should be difficult to pass.

But Classical Foundationalism (CF)
is based on Descartes ground up approach of a skyscraper. A skyscrapper
has a very strong foundation where a hundred floors may go straight up.
If anything is wrong on a lower floor the whole thing could come down -
much like if there was a theorem wrong in geometry - chances are your
whole basis of math is flawed/defective.

Test those ideas,,,,
Mike Dubbeld

Thank you for your reply, Mike.