"neepy" wrote in message
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(Richard Alexander) wrote in message
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Al Klein wrote in message
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[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?

Well, it depends on your definition of "science", doesn't it? Popper
used the concept of falsifiability to DEFINE science (actually, to
distinguish between "science" and "pseudoscience ...


Very close, but not quite right. Popper's famous book of 1959, _The Logic of
Scientific Discovery_ is all about statements.

It is all about distinguishing between statements which are suitably
scientific like "There is no X" and those which are merely idle metaphysical
speculation like "X exists" because there is no way to ever know it if "X
exists" is false, even if it were false. The only thing that can falsify it
is the statement, "There is no X."

Popper is providing a suitable "criterion of demarcation" (his words)
between empirically falsifiable scientific statements like "There is no X"
and un-falsifiable non-empirical metaphysical statements like "X exists."

See Karl Popper, _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_, chapter 4, "The
problem of demarcation."