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Author Topic:   Arguments 'evolutionists' should NOT use
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 43 of 74 (400294)
05-11-2007 10:37 PM
Reply to: Message 34 by kbertsche
05-10-2007 3:26 PM


quote:
I strongly disagree, for two reasons:
1) this is not the way people normally use the word "proof" in relating to science. They generally mean a logical proof similar to what is used in mathematics. You want to redefine the word for them, which is a big job and has questionable merit.
I'm with the "this is a bad argument" crowd. I don't understand where you're getting your more correct meaning for "proof". People, whether scientists or not, do not usually use the word "proof" in relation to science. It has a technical meaning in mathematics, but why import that meaning into science, and into a discussion with people who are neither scientists nor mathematicians?
quote:
2) this clouds a very important issue for how science is done. Namely, scientific theories must be amenable to DISproof (they must be disprovable in principle), but are never provable in the same sense. This concept is essential for understanding modern science, and redefining the word "proof" will cloud the issue.
This I also disagree with. Scientific theories are no more amenable to rigorous disproof than they are to rigorous proof: it is always possible to retain a theory, whatever the evidence, by modifying auxiliary hypotheses, and sometimes that's clearly the right thing to do. I'm no philosopher of science, but my impression is that falsification is pretty much dead as a demarcation criterion for science. In practice, one produces evidence for and against theories.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 34 by kbertsche, posted 05-10-2007 3:26 PM kbertsche has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 44 by kbertsche, posted 05-12-2007 1:35 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 50 of 74 (400358)
05-12-2007 6:32 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by kbertsche
05-12-2007 1:35 PM


quote:
No, falsification is still alive and is ESSENTIAL for something to be a scientific theory. If it's not falsifiable, it's not science! Yes, sometimes the theory can be modified to fit the new data, but sometimes it can't . Either way, the original theory was shown to be false.
Sometimes the theory is changed, and sometimes it's scrapped, and sometimes neither happens. Take an example: Ray Davis's solar neutrino experiment was devised to test solar models, which made specific predictions about neutrino production by solar fusion. The experiment took many years, but in the end the results were clearly in conflict with the predictions. The result? The theory survived unscathed, even though the data were (and are) perfectly valid. What had to be changed was not the theory, but an auxiliary hypothesis about the behavior of neutrinos.
Yes, scientific theories do indeed have to be testable, and are always subject to revision, but treating falsification as having a special logical status, the way Popper did, is not consistent with actual scientific practice.
quote:
This is just the very basic scientific method, which I was taught in grade school.
Well, yes, that is how it's taught in grade schools, but it's not how it's taught in current philosophy of science, at least as far as I know.
quote:
And this is the way science is done professionally, whether you agree with it or not. I am really surprised at how many folks here misunderstand or disagree with the scientific method! I am new to posting here; my initial impression is that this crowd is either not very scientifically literate or is intentionally being disingenuous to promote some agenda other than science.
I've been doing science professionally for a good twenty years now. It is worth noting that scientists are notoriously bad at systematically describing what they do for a living, so scientific experience may not be all that useful here.
quote:
If you want another opinion, take a look at "scientific method" in wikipedia.
But also read some of the criticisms of falsification in that same article. For a web-based look at some of the criticisms, you could start with Home – Physics World. For a deeper investigation, check out the collection Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. There are probably better references, but as I said, I'm not a philosopher of science.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 44 by kbertsche, posted 05-12-2007 1:35 PM kbertsche has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 51 by RAZD, posted 05-12-2007 8:37 PM sfs has replied
 Message 52 by Chiroptera, posted 05-12-2007 8:54 PM sfs has not replied
 Message 53 by kbertsche, posted 05-12-2007 9:23 PM sfs has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 54 of 74 (400368)
05-12-2007 9:23 PM
Reply to: Message 51 by RAZD
05-12-2007 8:37 PM


quote:
So there was a theory that was falsified and that was changed: the one about neutrino behavior.
The hypothesis that was based on the theory is still a hypothesis that is allowed with the change to the the theory of neutrino behavior, but it has not been tested yet.
This gets more into theory based on theory based on theory than it does on theory falsification.
Sure, some other theory was falsified. (Or rather, a better theory for neutrinos was found to match neutrino behavior better than the existing theory, which is not exactly the same thing.) The point is, however, that they thought they were testing a theory about the sun, but weren't. This is always a possibility when you have evidence that you think falsifies a theory -- maybe it's actually some other assumption that you've made that's wrong. That's why you can't know for certain that you have disproved a theory any more than you can know for certain that you've proved one. Both falsification and verification are problematic.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 51 by RAZD, posted 05-12-2007 8:37 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 55 by RAZD, posted 05-12-2007 10:07 PM sfs has replied
 Message 56 by kbertsche, posted 05-12-2007 10:12 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 57 of 74 (400491)
05-14-2007 10:51 AM
Reply to: Message 55 by RAZD
05-12-2007 10:07 PM


quote:
So you think it is actually possible that the earth is flat?
I don't think there's a realistic possibility that the Earth is flat, no. The argument here is about whether things can be disproven but not proven. Do you really think we can say for certain that the Earth is not flat, but that we can't say for certain that the Earth is roughly spherical? Because that is what is being argued.
quote:
The original theory did not match the data so it was falsified, the result was to modify the theory to match the data. What part of this is not the scientific process? Knowledge was still increased by the process yes?
That would be the scientific process if it had happened that way, but it didn't. Scientists did not look at the data and say, "Aha, it disagrees with our theory about neutrinos, and therefore the theory is wrong." They looked and saw that there was a disagreement with predictions, which meant that something was wrong, but they didn't know what; conflicting data by itself could not falsify any of the theories involved. Perhaps the solar models were wrong, perhaps there were unexpected artifacts in the experimental process, perhaps neutrino interactions with matter had been calculated incorrectly, perhaps neutrinos actually oscillate into different flavors. What permitted the scientific process to work in this case was the existence of a new theory of neutrinos (an obvious extension of the old one); that theory could explain the anomoly in the solar neutrino measurements, and also made other testable predictions. When those predictions were confirmed by observation, then it became clear what was going on. In other words, it wasn't a conflict between theory and data that did in the old theory, it was validation of a new theory that did it.
You can try to cast this story (and many others) into falsificationist terms, but it's really a misrepresentation of what happened if you do. And why would you want to? Popper promoted falsification as the essential element in science because he thought it solved the problem of induction, but it doesn't. So why treat it as more than one tool that science uses?
quote:
Which is why it is unreasonable to build too many theories on top of theory on top of theory with some steps involving unvalidated theories (hypothesis really) ... however this too is part of the review process on any theory in conflict with the evidence: the question is where the error comes from, not a discarding of the evidence to maintain the theory. Any part of the logical foundation can be the source of the error.
The problem with your comment is that essentially all of modern science is built of theories on top of theories on top of theories. Every scientific instrument incorporates all kinds of scientific knowledge from multiple fields, none of which have been fully validated (since nothing in science can ever be fully validated, right?). The theory that turned out to be wrong in the solar neutrino case was the Standard Model of particle physics, possibly the best-tested theory in the history of science -- it was not some off-the-cuff hypothesis somebody slapped together.
I quite agree with your conclusion, however. No one has suggested tossing out evidence. What I am arguing is that falsification is not the essence of science, and that disproof is just as problematic as proof. Neither of those points has anything to do with throwing out data.
quote:
Validation is always problematic, but some things are definitely falsified with no equivocation: that the earth is young is one. We may not know exactly how old the earth is, but the certainty is that it is not less than 4.5 billions of years old.
So your position is that we know for certain that the Earth is not younger than 10,000 years old, but we do not know for certain that it is older than 10,000 years old?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 55 by RAZD, posted 05-12-2007 10:07 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 63 by RAZD, posted 05-15-2007 8:10 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 58 of 74 (400493)
05-14-2007 11:00 AM
Reply to: Message 56 by kbertsche
05-12-2007 10:12 PM


quote:
But this is pretty much the same idea as "falsifiability." It is the same sense that Newton's theories were "falsified" by Einstein's. Newton's still work quite well in many cases, but there are cases in which they break down and are "false".
Look again at what you've written. How can one theory be falsified by another theory? Falsification is about comparing the predictions of a theory with observations, not with predictions from a different theory. Note that in the case of Newtonian physics, the existence of anomolous data was not enough to overthrow the theory; instead it took the discovery of a different theory that could explain both standard and anomolous data and that was simpler than the ad hoc ether explanations that were being cooked up.
quote:
Yes, on the basis of a single experiment one can never be sure. (And even on the basis of multiple experiments all done the same way.) This is why science demands repeatability and testability. Other experimenters will test a new theory with different procedures to try to improve upon the accuracy or precision, and eventually the various pieces will be sorted out.
Sure, but exactly the same can be said about validations of a theory: the more methods used to validate a theory, the greater the confidence in it. In neither falsification nor validation does confidence ever reach exactly 100%, but it can come very close. So what's logically special about falsification?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 56 by kbertsche, posted 05-12-2007 10:12 PM kbertsche has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 59 by NosyNed, posted 05-14-2007 11:15 AM sfs has replied
 Message 60 by Taz, posted 05-14-2007 11:42 AM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 61 of 74 (400511)
05-14-2007 12:12 PM
Reply to: Message 60 by Taz
05-14-2007 11:42 AM


quote:
This is called a nitpick. He was relying on the fact that it is well known that at the time newtonian mechanics couldn't explain certain observations, such as the orbit of mercury. Nitpicking on his choice of words would hardly move the conversation forward, would it?
I certainly wasn't trying to nitpick. My point was that his choice of words reflected reality in a way that falsification purists would reject. It generally takes both data and improved theory to bring down a successful theory, not just data. A theory that's being advanced for the first time, without a track record of successful predictions and fruitful hypotheses, is more readily falsified. A classic example of falsification in action was the search for proton decay, which was predicted by minimal grand unified theories of particle physics. The theory made clear predictions, experiments were built (at great cost) to test the predictions, the results differed from the predictions (no proton decay was observed), and the theory was dropped. It was very Popperian: conjecture and refutation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 60 by Taz, posted 05-14-2007 11:42 AM Taz has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 62 of 74 (400514)
05-14-2007 12:17 PM
Reply to: Message 59 by NosyNed
05-14-2007 11:15 AM


Re: Falsification's Importance
quote:
I think an important point is being missed.
As others have noted, in practice it may be difficult to "prove" a theory is falsified. There is often wiggle room which may be very legitamate or just someone clinging to a pet theory for too long.
However, the point about falsification is that a theory MUST be falsifiable in principle.
That is, the theory must be robust enough to allow for predictions based upon it that can be tested. It must have some way of tying it to some potential observations that would allow it to be giving some confirmation or disconfirmation.
I think we're all in agreement on that point. (If I weren't, I wouldn't have written "Yes, scientific theories do indeed have to be testable" in one of my replies above.)

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 Message 59 by NosyNed, posted 05-14-2007 11:15 AM NosyNed has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 64 of 74 (400643)
05-15-2007 8:35 PM
Reply to: Message 63 by RAZD
05-15-2007 8:10 PM


quote:
We can refine that to being roughly an oblate spheroid ... in the end we'd end up with a variable shape depending on the position of the moon and sun ... and hot spots and ... (I don't think there is a single shape involved eh?).
Each step of the way we move closer to what in reality exists. Yes we can definitely rule out flat, it has been invalidated.
So are you saying we can validate things in science, or not? Previously you claimed that validation was problematic in ways that invalidation was not. Is that true or not?
quote:
It seems to me that you are arguing that they didn't make any changes at all to accommodate the data while pointing out that they made changes to accommodate the data. What part of evaluating all the elements that go into the prediction that did not come to pass to see where the error in making the prediction came from is NOT covered by what happened? This includes all theories involved.
You don't appear to be addressing anything I wrote. I have never claimed that scientists don't make changes in response to data. What I claim is that disproof suffers from the same uncertainty as proof. That's all. All conclusions of science are tentative, including the conclusion that a theory has been falsified. In this case, it is still possible that the secondary data about neutrinos was also misinterpreted, as a result of yet another theory being wrong. Falsification is not a magic bullet in science.
quote:
My quibble is that some being used (especially in physics it seems to me) are without sufficient validation to qualify as more than a hypothesis and this leaves the structure more like a house of cards so you don't really know which card caused the house to fall. There is a difference in degree when using theories that have passed many prediction invalidation tests to build new theories and in using new ones that are barely out of the box.
Your quibble appears out of place here, since (as I already pointed out), the theory is question was the best tested in the history of physics.
quote:
The example you provided showed that invalidation occurred when the data did not match the prediction, that a change in a theory was made as a result. It was not the one that was used to make the prediction but it still occurred. Bad information was still ruled out and we are more honed in to what the possibility of reality is than before.
?? You again seem to be arguing against a point I'm not making. The original claim was about testing a theory against data. In this case, a test of a particular theory was made and the theory failed, in exactly the way that is supposed to falsify a theory, and that theory was not falsified. Data that contradicts a theory may not falsify it. In this case it was another theory that was falsified; in other cases it's poor understanding of the precise behavior of the experimental apparatus that is to blame.
My point is not that science doesn't change in response to data, but that simplistic formulations about how science changes in response to data are misleading.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 63 by RAZD, posted 05-15-2007 8:10 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 65 by RAZD, posted 05-15-2007 10:02 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 66 of 74 (400693)
05-16-2007 9:23 AM
Reply to: Message 65 by RAZD
05-15-2007 10:02 PM


quote:
This is distinct from proof. You can falsify - disprove - theories you cannot prove them.
The theory that the world is less than 10,000 years old is proven false by the evidence of tree rings alone.
I'll ask you again, since you ignored my question the first time. You maintain that the theory that the world is less than 10,000 years old has been proven false, and simultaneously maintain that the theory that the world is more than 10,000 years old has not been proven true. Is this an accurate statement of your position or not? It certainly seems to be an inevitable conclusion from your statements.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 65 by RAZD, posted 05-15-2007 10:02 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 68 by RAZD, posted 05-16-2007 8:03 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 67 of 74 (400695)
05-16-2007 9:51 AM
Reply to: Message 65 by RAZD
05-15-2007 10:02 PM


quote:
You have repeated this several times yet fail to see that results contradicting a prediction falsified A theory and that theory was changed. IF that had not occurred then the theory in question would be falsified. Failure to see that this is in fact the scientific process is just denial of the facts.
How can have I failed to see that the results falsified a theory when I stated exactly that? (And in the text you just quoted!) The question is whether you can ever know whether you've falsified the right theory. If contradictory evidence could be the result of a mistake in any of many theories, how will you ever know for certain that you've settled on the right one? How can you ever be absolutely certain (which seems to be your standard for something to be "proven") when you falsify a theory that some other theory isn't to blame for the discrepency? After all, you haven't proven any of them to be true.
If you want to reserve "prove" for absolute certainty, than nothing in science is ever proven or disproven. If you disagree, please present any case where disproof is absolute.
If, on the other hand, "proven" means shown with sufficient certainty that we can safely neglect the possibility of being wrong, than statements in science can be both proven and disproven. That the Earth is roughly spherical has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, and with much greater certainty than is attached to many instances of falsification in science.
quote:
IF that had not occurred then the theory in question would be falsified.
Sorry, but this is also wrong. Sometimes data contradict the predictions of a theory, and no theory is falsified. Take another neutrino case. Neutrinos were taken to be massless in the Standard Model. Two different kinds of experiments, with quite different techniques, produced data that were inconsistent with this model, and were instead consistent with neutrinos having a mass of 17 keV. At the end of the day, the theory of massless neutrinos was not falsified, and no other theory was falsified either. It turns out that both experimental systems had subtle features that were not adequately understood by the experimenters, and both coincidentally led to the same incorrect conclusion.
quote:
Perhaps you have another example eh? Otherwise you are flogging a dead horse. The fact that you personally don't like the result has no bearing on the validity of the process.
Don't like what result? What result do you think I don't like? Also, is would be useful if you were to provide any evidence at all in support for your claims. What is your evidence that science disproves but never proves?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 65 by RAZD, posted 05-15-2007 10:02 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 69 by RAZD, posted 05-16-2007 8:08 PM sfs has replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 70 of 74 (400882)
05-17-2007 7:17 AM
Reply to: Message 69 by RAZD
05-16-2007 8:08 PM


Re: equivocation
My original claim:
quote:
Sometimes the theory is changed, and sometimes it's scrapped, and sometimes neither happens. Take an example: Ray Davis's solar neutrino experiment was devised to test solar models, which made specific predictions about neutrino production by solar fusion. The experiment took many years, but in the end the results were clearly in conflict with the predictions. The result? The theory survived unscathed, even though the data were (and are) perfectly valid.
My recent statement:
quote:
How can have I failed to see that the results falsified a theory when I stated exactly that?
Your comment:
quote:
We are still talking about the same issue, no other one has been introduced. This is called equivocation.
Do you that little word that occurs before "theory" in the first quotation? It's "the", and it's called the definite article. It means the sentence is talking about a particular instance of something, as in "sometimes the particular theory being tested is changed". The second quotation uses a different, even shorter word, "a", which is known as the indefinite article. That one means that the sentence is talking about some member of a class, as in "one theory among many, but not the theory that was being tested, was falsified."
The two quotations are perfectly consistent.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 69 by RAZD, posted 05-16-2007 8:08 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 72 by RAZD, posted 05-17-2007 8:45 AM sfs has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 71 of 74 (400883)
05-17-2007 7:22 AM
Reply to: Message 68 by RAZD
05-16-2007 8:03 PM


quote:
The evidence that the earth is older than 10,000 years is what disproves the theory that the world is 10,000 years old.
quote:
and simultaneously maintain that the theory that the world is more than 10,000 years old has not been proven true.
That is not a theory, that is the evidence that disproves\invalidates the above theory. Evidence is not theory, it is fact. Facts disprove theory.
Because of the evidence available, the theory on the age of the earth has been revised and currently is that it is 4.55 billion years old. This theory on the age of the earth is still not proven.
I see. According to you, "The Earth is less than 10,000 years old" is a theory, while "The Earth is more than 10,000 years old" is not a theory. Uh huh.
You're right, your work here is done.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 68 by RAZD, posted 05-16-2007 8:03 PM RAZD has not replied

  
sfs
Member (Idle past 2533 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 74 of 74 (401126)
05-18-2007 1:05 PM
Reply to: Message 73 by Doddy
05-17-2007 10:04 PM


Re: Can I ask you to get back on topic?
Three arguments (or maybe one-line comebacks to creationist arguments would be a better description) that I see online and that annoy me:
1) "The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems". This one has already been mentioned, but I'm not sure it's been pointed out that it's just plain wrong. The 2nd law applies to both open and closed systems just fine. (One particular formulation of the law, in terms of the change in entropy of the system, only applies to closed systems.)
2) "Human didn't descend from monkeys; monkeys and humans have a common ancestor." Humans aren't descended from any living monkey, but the common ancestor would have looked like a monkey and would be called a monkey by anyone who saw it -- so yeah, humans are descended from monkeys.
3) "Evolution is just the change in allele frequencies over time, and we've observed that, so of course evolution is true." This is a true statement, and is fine if made with the intention of explaining what scientists mean by evolution, but I've also seen it used in debate with someone who doubts common descent as if it scored points somehow.
None of these is really a serious argument, however. I can't think of any bad ones at the moment.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 73 by Doddy, posted 05-17-2007 10:04 PM Doddy has not replied

  
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