On 13 Jul 2003 20:43:01 -0700, Richard Alexander wrote:

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?

Depends on what you mean by "testable". For a theory to be scientific, it
must at least be falsifiable. Whether that's the same as "testable" or
not is mostly a matter of semantics.


--
- Mike

Remove 'spambegone.net' and reverse to send e-mail.

In article ,
Uncle Al wrote:
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

1) Is M-theory testable? No.
2) Do high temp ceramic supercons have associated theory? No.

Is M-theory science? No, its current status is that of mathematics.
Science requires empirical constraint. Are high temp supercons
science? Sure! Science does not demand theoretical modeling.
Classical biology is the archetype of collected facts with no unifying
basis. DNA analysis eventually appeared. Biology did not change its
status as a science - but it did become predictive given a model.

MBA domination of funding carefully erected the hallucination that
research has a PERT chart and guaranteed results. 98% of that result
is journals bursting with Least Publishable Units and a flood of
second-rate MS and PhDs whose disciplines cannot absorb them.
Discovery cannot be managed, nor is it subject to statistical quality
control. The big discoveries are invariably made by undeserving
personal in wretched circumstances, by "accident." This then
justifies the MBA system. See? It works!

Bullshit. It is a disaster. Funding is funneled to safely
scientifically unproductive senior faculty who have eaten their
brains. They voluminously publish papers and disgorge second rate
degreed personnel. The statistics roll and MBAs get performance
bonuses. Young faculty starves because its ideas are "too risky" to
fund. Anybody can do a parameterized discounted cashflow/return on
investment sheaf of scenarios and prove beyond argument that young
faculty should not be funded at all - certainly not until they
establish themselves as being safely, acceptably productive.

It might be even worse than that Uncle Al. Over the past few days
here in Oz (the place, not the man) the airwaves have been full of
assertions that scientific creativity and accomplishment cease on
marriage.

Given that so many young blokes and sheilas now shack up at a
relatively early age, will this further reduce prospects for future
human invention; or does it require the formality of wedded bliss to
stiffle discovery?

Bottom line: Basic resarch should be abolished and its funding
redirected into higher-yielding investments. With no need for such
research, there is no need for its personnel and its infrastructure to
be maintained or created in the first place. Downsizing of science
with concomittant substantially increased oversight to optimize what
remains should be a national priority.

Uncle Al says, "The goal of Accounting is to value a corporation for
liquidiation; but corporations are not run to be liquidated."


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

"Gregory L. Hansen" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

It needn't be immediately testable with current technology and the
resources humans are willing to put into it. Those are just practical
considerations.

But, among other qualities, a theory must say something definite about
nature, must make concrete predictions of observables that will be either
right or wrong. Theory aids the understanding, but science is
fundamentally empirical.


www.m-w.com

Main Entry: em·pir·i·cal
Pronunciation: -i-k&l
Variant(s): also em·pir·ic /-ik/
Function: adjective
Date: 1569
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience empirical data


That is why scientists differentiate between :

1. universal, scientific (empirical) statements ("There is no X") because we
can all observe, experience it when such statements are false, and

2. unscientific, metaphysical (non-empirical) statements ("X exists")
because the only thing that falsifies any such statement is the universal,
empirical statement "There is no X."

See Popper, _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_.

And see this principle put in practice in the scientific method of
investigation:

Null : of, being, or relating to zero
www.m-w.com
(as in, "There are no ETs.")


---
Testing the Null Hypothesis
by John Marcus, MD
email

http://www.setileague.org/editor/null.htm

SETI is perhaps the most highly interdisciplinary of sciences,
encompassing not only astronomy, biology, engineering and physics, but
also psychology, metaphysics, probability, and belief. But it is, first
and foremost, a science, one to which we hope to apply the scientific
method.

[...]

The Scientific Method for the Argus search is this:

There are no ET's. (null hypothesis).

.... [W]e now design an experiment (Project Argus, for example) to try to
prove that statement wrong, recognizing that it takes only one clear,
unambiguous counter-example to reject the null hypothesis. ...

---

In article ,
Uncle Al wrote:
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

1) Is M-theory testable? No.
2) Do high temp ceramic supercons have associated theory? No.

Is M-theory science? No, its current status is that of mathematics.
Science requires empirical constraint. Are high temp supercons
science? Sure! Science does not demand theoretical modeling.
Classical biology is the archetype of collected facts with no unifying
basis. DNA analysis eventually appeared. Biology did not change its
status as a science - but it did become predictive given a model.

MBA domination of funding carefully erected the hallucination that
research has a PERT chart and guaranteed results. 98% of that result
is journals bursting with Least Publishable Units and a flood of
second-rate MS and PhDs whose disciplines cannot absorb them.
Discovery cannot be managed, nor is it subject to statistical quality
control. The big discoveries are invariably made by undeserving
personal in wretched circumstances, by "accident." This then
justifies the MBA system. See? It works!

Bullshit. It is a disaster. Funding is funneled to safely
scientifically unproductive senior faculty who have eaten their
brains. They voluminously publish papers and disgorge second rate
degreed personnel. The statistics roll and MBAs get performance
bonuses. Young faculty starves because its ideas are "too risky" to
fund. Anybody can do a parameterized discounted cashflow/return on
investment sheaf of scenarios and prove beyond argument that young
faculty should not be funded at all - certainly not until they
establish themselves as being safely, acceptably productive.

It might be even worse than that Uncle Al. Over the past few days
here in Oz (the place, not the man) the airwaves have been full of
assertions that scientific creativity and accomplishment cease on
marriage.

Given that so many young blokes and sheilas now shack up at a
relatively early age, will this further reduce prospects for future
human invention; or does it require the formality of wedded bliss to
stiffle discovery?

Bottom line: Basic resarch should be abolished and its funding
redirected into higher-yielding investments. With no need for such
research, there is no need for its personnel and its infrastructure to
be maintained or created in the first place. Downsizing of science
with concomittant substantially increased oversight to optimize what
remains should be a national priority.

Uncle Al says, "The goal of Accounting is to value a corporation for
liquidiation; but corporations are not run to be liquidated."


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

"Gregory L. Hansen" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

It needn't be immediately testable with current technology and the
resources humans are willing to put into it. Those are just practical
considerations.

But, among other qualities, a theory must say something definite about
nature, must make concrete predictions of observables that will be either
right or wrong. Theory aids the understanding, but science is
fundamentally empirical.


www.m-w.com

Main Entry: em·pir·i·cal
Pronunciation: -i-k&l
Variant(s): also em·pir·ic /-ik/
Function: adjective
Date: 1569
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience empirical data


That is why scientists differentiate between :

1. universal, scientific (empirical) statements ("There is no X") because we
can all observe, experience it when such statements are false, and

2. unscientific, metaphysical (non-empirical) statements ("X exists")
because the only thing that falsifies any such statement is the universal,
empirical statement "There is no X."

See Popper, _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_.

And see this principle put in practice in the scientific method of
investigation:

Null : of, being, or relating to zero
www.m-w.com
(as in, "There are no ETs.")


---
Testing the Null Hypothesis
by John Marcus, MD
email

http://www.setileague.org/editor/null.htm

SETI is perhaps the most highly interdisciplinary of sciences,
encompassing not only astronomy, biology, engineering and physics, but
also psychology, metaphysics, probability, and belief. But it is, first
and foremost, a science, one to which we hope to apply the scientific
method.

[...]

The Scientific Method for the Argus search is this:

There are no ET's. (null hypothesis).

.... [W]e now design an experiment (Project Argus, for example) to try to
prove that statement wrong, recognizing that it takes only one clear,
unambiguous counter-example to reject the null hypothesis. ...

---

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?

No hypothesis can be considered part of the scientific method if it is not
fundamentally disprovable.

greywolf42
ubi dubium ibi libertas

"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.

"Phred" wrote in message
news:beuli5$8t0fg$1@ID-
It might be even worse than that Uncle Al. Over the past few days
here in Oz (the place, not the man) the airwaves have been full of
assertions that scientific creativity and accomplishment cease on
marriage.

Given that so many young blokes and sheilas now shack up at a
relatively early age, will this further reduce prospects for future
human invention; or does it require the formality of wedded bliss to
stiffle discovery?

this ran in the UK as well. Apparently the only advantage is that it also
stifles the criminal urge as well, so we shall perhaps be uninventive but
honest

Jim Webster

(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

It needn't be immediately testable with current technology and the
resources humans are willing to put into it. Those are just practical
considerations.

I agree; a statement need only have the potential to be tested to be
testable. This consideration can make it a bit tricky to say what is
or isn't testable--or, more accurately, to inform certain idiots that
their suggestion is wrong, for reasons that they can't or won't
possibly comprehend or accept.

But, among other qualities, a theory must say something definite about
nature, must make concrete predictions of observables that will be either
right or wrong. Theory aids the understanding, but science is
fundamentally empirical.

An experiment must be repeatable to be scientific.

(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

It needn't be immediately testable with current technology and the
resources humans are willing to put into it. Those are just practical
considerations.

I agree; a statement need only have the potential to be tested to be
testable. This consideration can make it a bit tricky to say what is
or isn't testable--or, more accurately, to inform certain idiots that
their suggestion is wrong, for reasons that they can't or won't
possibly comprehend or accept.

But, among other qualities, a theory must say something definite about
nature, must make concrete predictions of observables that will be either
right or wrong. Theory aids the understanding, but science is
fundamentally empirical.

An experiment must be repeatable to be scientific.

In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote in message
...
In article ,
Richard Alexander wrote:
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?

It needn't be immediately testable with current technology and the
resources humans are willing to put into it. Those are just practical
considerations.

I agree; a statement need only have the potential to be tested to be
testable. This consideration can make it a bit tricky to say what is
or isn't testable--or, more accurately, to inform certain idiots that
their suggestion is wrong, for reasons that they can't or won't
possibly comprehend or accept.

String theories typically aren't testable due to technological and
resource limitations. But they do make definite predictions that differ
from those of other theories, predictions of observable things that could
in principle be tested.


But, among other qualities, a theory must say something definite about
nature, must make concrete predictions of observables that will be either
right or wrong. Theory aids the understanding, but science is
fundamentally empirical.

An experiment must be repeatable to be scientific.

Can you repeat SN1987A?

There are a lot of experiments or observations that can't or shouldn't be
repeated, but we can still make some science out of it by repeating those
we can, and understanding the multitude in a theoretical context.
--
"When fighting with sharpened Bronze, or harder Metals from the Heavens,
it is Wise to kick thy Opponent, be he a Chaldean or a man of Uruk, in his
Man Sack, that thou mayst defeat him more handily than by Arms. So sayeth
INNAMURUTUSHIMMILODEK, who hath slain threescore Ammelekites."

On 14 Jul 2003 10:31:50 -0700, (Richard Alexander)
wrote:


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 that's easy.

Hypothesis: Yes. Hypotheses can be anything.
Theory: Yes. It's just the hypothesis that fits the data best.
Principle: Not part of scientific method.
Statement: Ditto.



--
Highpriest in the Church Of The Invisible Pink Unicorn

Mike Ruskai wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "testable". For a theory to be scientific, it
must at least be falsifiable. Whether that's the same as "testable" or
not is mostly a matter of semantics.


For a theory to be useful it must make predictions, and is thereby
testable and falsifiable.

Mike Ruskai wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "testable". For a theory to be scientific, it
must at least be falsifiable. Whether that's the same as "testable" or
not is mostly a matter of semantics.


For a theory to be useful it must make predictions, and is thereby
testable and falsifiable.

"Jeremy" wrote in message news:LYqQa.56152$Ph3.6037@sccrnsc04...
"Richard Alexander" wrote in message
om...

Uhg... Something scientific *must* be testable, by definition. Learn how to
do twelve seconds of googling. Take your ADD meds.

In light of the other replies so far on this thread, I wish I had also
asked for the background of the responder.