"A hypothesis which cannot be falsified is, ultimately, of no value whatsoever"

in fact how do you know that you are actually alive or that anything around you is real rather than a spark within your brain as you die? Can you prove love?

No, please, not that old bogus nonsensical question! Say it isn't so!

follow science. By the way, scientists have identified the sections of the brain responsible for the emotion of love.

Quite a big difference...

I cannot validate with absolute proof that gravity is a function of mass and distance, but we could easily prove that false with appropriate data.

There's an element of jargon involved, just as the "expected value" of a bet isn't merely what you consider most likely as the net monetary result.

Consider an example:

You buy a new deck of 52 playing cards, plus maybe a joker, etc. You shuffle the cards fairly thoroughly. Then you store them in a safety deposit box. For the next 364 days, you don't open the box.

On the first anniversary of putting the deck into the box, you access the box, remove the deck, and as quickly as you can, you put the cards into sequence: 2, 3, ..., jack, queen, king, with the sub-sequences always in the order spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts. The ace can go at the beginning or end. Then you put the deck back into the safety deposit box, and for the next nine years you keep it there without opening the box.

Finally, after having rented the box for a total of ten years, you take the deck out of the box. To your surprise, the bank manager says, "I will give you a thousand dollars if you can put the deck into the sequence it was in during the first year that it was in the safety deposit box." The bank manager was curious about what was going on. That's why he made the offer.

You didn't record that information. Let's assume that you are overcome by greed. You fake putting the deck into a special order and then ask for the thousand dollars. We can be confident that your claim that this was the sequence during the first year is unfalsifiable. Maybe God could confirm that you didn't get ultra-lucky, or God could congratulate you on having guessed right (an event much less likely than winning any lottery jackpot), but we can be confident that no human being can prove that it's false.

Of course, our confidence could be misplaced. Maybe the bank manager got suspicious and called the Department of Homeland Security to record the sequence of cards in the deck. For example, maybe it was feared that you would loan the key of the box to a terrorist who would study the sequence to receive a coded message from you. However, no terrorist showed up. You were the only one who opened the box, but maybe the Department of Homeland Security retains a record of what was the sequence of cards before the first anniversary of the deck being in the box.

the example does not demonstrate the relationship between "falsified" and "hypothesis," unless you are using usage #4 for the word "hypothesis" from Dictionary.com.

Usage #4 = "a mere assumption or guess." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hypothesis

Okay, why don't you give it a try?

Every night, after eating this meal, Mr. Person suffers heart burn.

After Mr. Person tells Mr. Human about his meal and heartburn, he asks Mr. Human why he thinks he gets heart burn. Mr. Human considers the known variables, the food and drink, the time of the meal, Mr. Person's age and general health, etc. Mr. Human also considers his own personal knowledge of heart burn.

Mr. Human comes up with the hypothesis; Mr. Person gets heart burn when he consumes a combination of pizza and coffee at night. This hypothesis is falsifiable. Mr. Human invites Mr. Person over to his house in order to test his hypothesis. Unfortunately, Mr. Person dies in a horrific car accident on his way to Mr. Human's house and is burned to a crisp. Now Mr. Person's hypothesis is not falsifiable.

------------------

This scenario uses usage #1 for the word "hypothesis" from Dictionary.com

"a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts."

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hypothesis

Please say sarcasm.

Entertainment is extremely valuable.

He thought that because many biologists said things like, the creatures that survive to reproduce are the most fit creatures. He considered that a tautology. In some ways, we may consider that to be a valid hypothesis, depending on our defintion of fitness - for instance, we include the accidental environmental factors that allow one creature to out reproduce another as part of fitness.

So, we have this non-falsifiable hypothesis. Is it worth anything? Yes. Studying this hypothesis may lead us to the further hypothesis that, excluding accidental environmental factors, creatures that have the best adapted phenotype are more likely to survive to reproduce than others.

We can learn from non-falsifiable hypotheses.

Like any other hypothesis, its meaning depends upon the definition of terms. And, using the definitions that I specified, the later hypothesis is not based on a misunderstanding of terms but on a refinement of the conditions being considered. It's an example of how an unfalsifiable hypothesis can be useful, not a claim that Popper's original thoughts about natural selection were right. His change of mind was not based on a misunderstanding of terms; but rather upon the realization that people describing natural selection were using language sloppily.

"the creatures that survive to reproduce are the most fit creatures"

What, exactly, is that hypothesizing? All it's done is said what they mean when they use the word "fit". It's a tautology because all definitions are tautologies.

The exact tautology that Popper took the original claims about natural selection to be. Popper did not claim that it wasn't a hypothesis, he claimed that it wasn't a scientific hypothesis.

What is this supposed "hypothesis"... hypothesizing?

the creatures that survive to reproduce are the most fit creatures

I left the definition of fitness open; we can easily make it a measure of longevity. It's still tautological; but, it makes a claim.

...I read it telling me what the term "fit" means in evolutionary theory.



No you didn't. It says it right there. "the creatures that survive to reproduce are the most fit creatures"

That leaves nothing open about what fit means. It means reproductively successful.



"A pedal driven two wheeled vehicle is a bicycle"

That's a claim too. It's not an hypothesis, it's a word definition.

"Hypothesis" =/= "claim".

"Hypothesis" = "proferred explanation of an observation", or "tentative assumption that is pending testing"... but not simply "claim".

Tell me a single possible example of a situation where one would be true but not the other. Because they look an awful lot like synonymous statements to me. Tell me when a creature would survive to reproduce and NOT be successful reproducing? Or, alternatlevely... when a creature would be successful reproducing without surviving to reproduce?

And that was hardly the central point of the post you were replying to. Are you declining to contest the rest of it?

Care to try again? If Successfully reproducing is a subset of surviving to reproduce then there are situations in which animals survive to reproduce without successfully reproducing.

Name one.

Edit: P.S. I'll take that as a "no" to the intent to contend anything else I said then?

A lion survives to mate with a lioness and the lioness dies as the first cub is being born, and the cub dies, the other cubs are never born.

...of surviving to reproduce is when they don't actually reproduce, just get close?

Or your definition of "successfully" reproducing doesn't include having offspring?

Which is it?

Edit: Also, just to point out... since you seem uninteresting in arguing over anything but this semantic distinction that has nothing to do with what constitutes an hypothesis but has relevence only to the definition of "fit" you have already effectively conceded the actual debate.

The point is that a non-falsifiable hypothesis can have value because it can be a clarifying statement. Once again, I'll refer back to Popper, who, when he said that natural selection was not a testable hypothesis, still claimed that it was a valuable statement.

The point was that this wasn't an hypothesis in the first place. A point you have seemed to be uninterested in substantively contesting.

I can ask yet again if you like. What is this supposed hypothesis you presented actually hypothesizing? I see it telling us what the word "fit" means in evolution and I don't see it doing anything else.

I not only "substantively contested" that it wasn't a hypothesis, I explicitly stated what the hypothesis was. We've been over all this already. Rather than continue going in circles, I'm done.

I didn't ask you what the hypothesis was. I already know what you think the hypothesis is. You think it's this:

"the creatures that survive to reproduce are the most fit creatures"

I told you that is NOT an hypothesis, that is a definition of the evolutionary term "fit". In order for that to be an hypothesis it has to hypothesize something.

I asked you what it is hypothesizing. Then I asked you again when you ignored me. Then I asked you again when you ignored me again... which got us here. That is not going in a circle, that is simply never leaving the starting line.

So... what is it hypothesizing that MAKES that a hypothesis?

In post 24 the only thing you did was repost the exact same sentence we're arguing about being a hypothesis. You didn't even ATTEMPT to explain what that statement was actually hypothesizing, neither explicitly nor implicitly. All you did was say "it's still a claim", as if that had anything to do with anything.

Did you perhaps miss me calling to your attention in response that something being a claim DOES NOT MAKE IT A HYPOTHESIS?

"A hypothesis which cannot be falsified IN PRINCIPLE is, ultimately, of no value whatsoever"

Evolution has not been falsified because it is true.

"Has not" is not the same as "can not". Evolution is completely falsifiable.

Rabbit fossils in the precambrian? Falsified. The fact that they're not there doesn't mean it's impossible they would have been there if the hypothesis was false... which is what falsifiability requires. The ability to prove it's false if it is false. Not the ability to prove it's false even if it's true.

I wrote a blog post on this just 5 days ago.

http://duelingdogma.blogspot.com/2010/06/vastly-underappreciated-importance-of.html

The answer is yes btw. Unfalsifiable hypothesis = Worthless hypothesis. Comnpletely devoid of information content.

and is only used by people who parrot Popper without having thought about the issue themselves. To be scientifically useful, a hypothesis needs to be testable, not falsifiable.