Is Aquinas' First Way Falsifiable? (jd!)

[Touchstone]

JDaniel:

Or, has that point in time not arrived yet? (Perhaps that gives new meaning to the theory of universe contraction! It is one thing to consider these questions from a perspective of poor definitions; it is quite another to ponder them from the perspective of proper definitions, is it not?)

Indeed, but I suspect we have nearly opposite ideas of what makes a poor or proper definition as regards the state of the world around us.

To consider the universe as merely something that is a part of something else – that just always was – is a postulation.

Yes, but that is why falsification is so crucial as a foundation for knowledge. Hypotheses and postulations abound, and many cannot be dismissed *a priori. *‘Absolute space’ might have been right on, if the universe were structured differently. It might have been true, and relativity falsified. That’s why we need falsification, to provide some epistemic grounds for dismissing some of the candidates. So here you have a competing idea, that the universe is part of an eternal chain, stretching back infinitely, and now you are stuck. You have no way to discredit that idea nor your idea based on what we observe, test or see happening around us. Even a “Big Bang”, as “start-like” as I can think of for a universe could possibly be just one link in an infinite chain. If it were, we wouldn’t know any better. If weren’t we wouldn’t know any better, either. Neither the affirmative or denial of that idea is even possibly in danger of being falsified by our experiences in the world.

The problems inherent in a concept of a multiverse that is infinite brings us back to the problem of that point in time when a suffocating infinity of beings could have existed somewhere along the way. I think it is safe to say that even a multiverse would have to be finite. For, if all of this was infinite, then there is no good reason that we are here now, nor any good reason that what is here has not undergone a complete suffocation (and annihilation) by an infinite multitude of material beings. There cannot be any infinity of matter or material beings that does not cause the ultimate and utter internment of all mobile beings.

continued . . .

If your claim were true, you’d have no way to show it. If it were false, you’d have no way to show it. And crucially, you have no way to tell, even in principle, which is false. Again this is straightforward to apply: if “infinite multiverse” or “finite multiverse” or “finite universe” or “finite multiverse” is false as a model of reality, what would you anticipate discovering that would be dispositive, effective in falsifying any or all of them, showing how that idea cannot work?

-TS

OnEdit: Should be “Michelson/Morley” above. Too late to edit the response before this one.

 

[JDaniel]

Thanks, jd, for time and effort you invested in taking this up. I appreciate it, and wasn’t in a hurry, and am not, so no worries on this thread going slow. This is stuff we do in our free time, and we both have real duties and priorities that come first.

TS:

Thank you.

I did take time to read back through your “first part”, above, and your triptych here. There’s lots of interesting stuff to engage, but I want to focus on getting a clear summary drawn from this as to how the First Way is (or is not) falsifiable.

In reading back through the thread, I do have one point I should have made earlier, regarding circularity, which I’ll touch on, now: A circular definition and a circular argument are both self-referential in their elements, but they are not the same thing. A circular definition is valid, but not useful. A circular argument is problematic because it relies on production, not tautology. Circularity in an argument defeats the production of the argument, where it just renders a definition… trivially true (a=a).

What do you mean by, “production,” in the above context?

Nevertheless, the definition of motion from physics is merely the measurement of a path; it tells us nothing about the body (in motion) nor its motion. It is no more than static line. This provides not thing about the actual physical happening. It is useful only to measure that an apple that falls from two ft. above ground level will probably get bruised less than one that falls from 15 ft. AGL. While that might be information enjoyed by a farmer or a grocer, it holds little more than a trivial curiosity for me and I’ll bet most others.

Onward…

Heh. I think you meant ‘digress’, there (I’m not sure one can “diverge” – move in different directions from a common point – all by oneself, it strikes me as something like saying “I’ve tried sitting apart, it’s very painful”… diverging, like sitting apart is not a solo sport), but ‘diverge’ works in a strange way here, nevertheless, so maybe that’s precisely what you meant.

I’m just going to note that I’ve not dismissed anything you’ve said here with this post; we can return to whatever we need here. But for the purposes of summarizing on the question of falsification, we don’t have anything in this post that offers a recipe or criterion for falsification.

-TS

I am not too sure about this, although I am inclined to agree with you if you ponder the dialectic divided up into numerous interdependent smaller pieces, as I have done. But, taking the argument as a whole may be another thing altogether. Reading Karl Popper’s essay again, reminded me of several of the exorbitances he likes to express his, hopefully, having discovered a way to prove what science is and what science is not. I, for my own part, do not necessarily agree with the entire scope of his ardorous “discovery.” What his summary leaves out of the equation is what some like to call brute .

Brute exigencies are want to be accepted by science precisely because, like an objectum, the happening strikes against one’s senses with such phenomenological force that it seems resistant to deniability. Yet such brute happenings are often successfully denied. Likewise, that propositions may be falsifiable, does not always assure their veracity. I think Popper’s idea is important particularly for the modern sciences. Why? Because many propositions from modern science are not phenomenologically provable. Newton’s theory of uniform motion in absolute space is a perfect example, although it is more than likely quite true.

But, when it comes to primordial man and his primordial science, the objectums are brutally sensed, rather than observed in controlled, repetitive situations. This does not mean that the un-falsifiability betokens non-provability, or rather, non-phenomenal material emergence. There are several kinds of motion, as was pointed out in my overly-long explanation of motion. But, for the primordial observer, it quickly became clear that motion (in its strictest sense) meant change from one positive state to another positive state. Non-being was not involved at either end of this process. But, as primordial man looked ever closer, he discovered that there were other motions that did not precisely correspond one-to-one with this more primordial observance.

Now we use the word to refer to several different kinds of motion, including the previous one: (1) the term can proceed from a negative termination to a positive one: such as, the birth process of a child. Or, (2) the term can proceed from a positive termination to a negative one: such as, the death of a man. Or, (3) the term can proceed from a negative term to a negative term. (But here there is no physical movement.) All of these are brute incarnations of motion in the sense of change. As brute incarnations, how then are we to improve their veracity by falsification? Yet, we know they are true facts; we intuit their verisimilitude. To deny them is no different than to deny objective reality. They are objective reality.

continued . . .

 

[JDaniel]

continuation . . .

But, my point is this: does the thing being denied have to exist as false essentially in order to be verifiable? It can’t be called ‘science’, in the modern sense of the word, but, it can certainly be called ‘science’ referring to the wider meaning as ‘a body of knowledge’. And certainly falsifiability can proceed from either a positive or its negation can’t it? To say “No human being lives forever.” is the negative corollary of, “All human beings live forever,” is it not? Thus, while the latter is not falsifiable, the former assuredly is.

So, if this is what you mean by asserting that Saint Thomas is not scientifically falsifiable, then nothing useful, IMHO, has been said. (I’ve been waiting to use that word, “useful,” in this thread somewhere! I believe that the ‘usefulness’ proposition that is so over-used to prove theses is long overdue to be stricken from the language regarding such propositions: even astrology and Eckankar claim to be "useful’ - and, probably are, to some extent, however minute.)

One other point I’d like to make has to do with the word, ‘metaphysics’. I’m not sure when the word came to be bastardized to mean improvable, and in a bad way. That certainly was not its origin. It originally meant, and still does, actually: the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things , including abstract concepts such as being , knowing, substance, cause, identity, time , and space. - Oxford Dictionaries (bolding is mine)

God bless,
jd

 

[Touchstone]

TS:

Thank you.

What do you mean by, “production,” in the above context?

Logic is productive, establishing new propositions. Definitions are associative, establishing “pointers” (“this” is related to “that”). Rules produce, definitions associate.

So circular logic defeats your product, your conclusion, or more precisely, demotes it to a trivial production, or a definition. The rules broke down (don’t assume your conclusion!) and you are left with just an association, not a productive argument.

Shorter version: “productive” points at the “ergo” in a syllogism.

Nevertheless, the definition of motion from physics is merely the measurement of a path;

I think it’s more rudimentary even than that. It includes motion we’d describe as a “path”, of course, but in the famous “double slit” experiments, we are confronted with ‘no path’, or ‘all paths’ or ‘parts of every possible path, not none realized’ between our points of observation, depending on how you interpret quantum weirdness and “summing over paths”. I’m not sure it’s important to what you’re saying here, but if it is, physics ‘motion’ isn’t a measure of a path, or even all paths, but maybe a probability function we can sum over all possible paths. “Motion” as a path we can measure doesn’t work at the quantum level.

Motion in this case is the change in location over time. The intermediate points or paths may be conceptually problematic (and are), but no matter, we understand motion to have occurred if location changes over time.

it tells us nothing about the body (in motion) nor its motion. It is no more than static line. This provides not thing about the actual physical happening. It is useful only to measure that an apple that falls from two ft. above ground level will probably get bruised less than one that falls from 15 ft. AGL. While that might be information enjoyed by a farmer or a grocer, it holds little more than a trivial curiosity for me and I’ll bet most others.

It’s crucial, all the way down. motion is a function of energy, so where motion occurs we have necessary implications concerning mass and energy, according to our physics models. That is, physics as a model understand motion (location change over time) to have necessary ramifications for other dynamics, and so that definition is “physics compatible”. If motion were “no more than a static line”, our models would break that use that definition. A definition isn’t “true” or “false” on its own, but that particular one would not be effective in our model, so we’d have to choose another one.

In any case, though, definitions are just tools. What provides utility and knowledge are models. Models use terms and concepts that carry semantics (have definitions), but the “truth” and utility comes from the model, not the definitions.

I am not too sure about this, although I am inclined to agree with you if you ponder the dialectic divided up into numerous interdependent smaller pieces, as I have done. But, taking the argument as a whole may be another thing altogether. Reading Karl Popper’s essay again, reminded me of several of the exorbitances he likes to express his, hopefully, having discovered a way to prove what science is and what science is not. I, for my own part, do not necessarily agree with the entire scope of his ardorous “discovery.” What his summary leaves out of the equation is what some like to call brute .

OK. Could be. So how do we test that? If you’re right, then adding in this missing factor in the equation should produce even more high performance models than what Popperian science produces. What would you point me to as an example of this superior performing model that excelled due to incorporation of brute in the model?

-TS

(continued…)

 

[Touchstone]

jDaniel:

Brute exigencies are want to be accepted by science precisely because, like an objectum, the happening strikes against one’s senses with such phenomenological force that it seems resistant to deniability. Yet such brute happenings are often successfully denied. Likewise, that propositions may be falsifiable, does not always assure their veracity.

No, agreed. Falsifiability does not and cannot assure the veracity of any proposition. It can only establish that it can be meaningful if that proposition is not falsified. It may be falsified, and those shown the door, but it may also be falsifiable-but-unfalsified, which means it has epistemic weight a trivial proposition does not have, just by virtue of being falsifiable. “All dogs go to heaven” isn’t subject to falsification for us, so its gossamer as propositional knowledge. “Gravitational pull dissipates according to the inverse square of the distance from the mass” is falsifiable, and therefore has value as propositional knowledge just because we could expect to find out it was false if it were actually false.

This is the key to Popper’s insight. Human knowledge is eliminative. What we call “true” as knowledge earns that position not by being “verified” in and of itself, but in being falsifiable, and yet avoiding falsification. If multiple competing explanations are be falsifiable and yet are not falsified, we look to economy as a preference, preferring parsimony among the unfalsified-but-falsifiable candidates (and that heuristic fails us at points, too).

I think Popper’s idea is important particularly for the modern sciences. Why? Because many propositions from modern science are not phenomenologically provable. Newton’s theory of uniform motion in absolute space is a perfect example, although it is more than likely quite true.

The importance of Popper is that he turned our criteria for knowledge on its head: Knowledge isn’t “verifiable” or “provable” per se. Rather it is what’s left standing after all falsification efforts couldn’t touch it. That’s why it’s crucial that a proposition be falsifiable in principle, at least, because if it is not, it will be easily be mistaken for knowledge. You can’t falsify what’s unfalsifiable, and if knowledge obtains in the “absence of falsification for potentially falsifiable propositions”, then admitting unfalsifiable proposition cheats your epistemology and represents pseudo-knowledge.

But, when it comes to primordial man and his primordial science, the objectums are brutally sensed, rather than observed in controlled, repetitive situations. This does not mean that the un-falsifiability betokens non-provability, or rather, non-phenomenal material emergence. There are several kinds of motion, as was pointed out in my overly-long explanation of motion. But, for the primordial observer, it quickly became clear that motion (in its strictest sense) meant change from one positive state to another positive state. Non-being was not involved at either end of this process. But, as primordial man looked ever closer, he discovered that there were other motions that did not precisely correspond one-to-one with this more primordial observance.

OK. But even for the ancients, falsifiability affords the same benefits. If “wearing black fur prevents the deer your hunting from seeing you” is advanced, we don’t really know if that’s true if we try it out a couple times, and it seems to work. So far so good, but the evidence it humble. If the third time you try, the deer pegs you as you approach in black fur, and runs off, you have your falsification. It doesn’t matter how many other times you managed to get to the deer without it noticing you in your black fur, if the deer clearly saw you in your black fur, and ran off, your proposition fails, and your model needs adjusting.

No fancy equipment or white lab coats needed. It’s just practical knowledge building at work.

If, after thousands of trials, where the deer never catch on to your presence until you are upon them in your black far, and any other color has them running off from you when you a hundred meters off and more, you have much better grounds to accept the Black Fur Idea as knowledge. It might have been falsified, and per the performance of gray fur and brown fur (fail!) we expect if black fur wasn’t effective, we would have seen different results. So we understand the idea to falsifiable, yet unfalsified in that case. As “verified” as “verified” gets – the more chances to be falsified passed without falsification the better.

Now we use the word to refer to several different kinds of motion, including the previous one: (1) the term can proceed from a negative termination to a positive one: such as, the birth process of a child. Or, (2) the term can proceed from a positive termination to a negative one: such as, the death of a man. Or, (3) the term can proceed from a negative term to a negative term. (But here there is no physical movement.) All of these are brute incarnations of motion in the sense of change. As brute incarnations, how then are we to improve their veracity by falsification? Yet, we know they are true facts; we intuit their verisimilitude. To deny them is no different than to deny objective reality. They are objective reality.

continued . . .

I think we need to check defintions, again. I understand “brute” as your using it here (e.g. brute force, brute fact) to mean “purely physical”. As such that establishes… physicality, but it doesn’t address anything regarding ‘knowledge by intuition’. I think you are referring to percepts or raw stimuli, which I agree are not deniable, but self-evident (again, by definition; if it’s not self-evident it’s not a brute stimulus).

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

continuation . . .

But, my point is this: does the thing being denied have to exist as false essentially in order to be verifiable? It can’t be called ‘science’, in the modern sense of the word, but, it can certainly be called ‘science’ referring to the wider meaning as ‘a body of knowledge’. And certainly falsifiability can proceed from either a positive or its negation can’t it? To say “No human being lives forever.” is the negative corollary of, “All human beings live forever,” is it not? Thus, while the latter is not falsifiable, the former assuredly is.

That’s incorrect. It’s not symmetric. As you have it here:

(F) “No human being lives forever” (the former) => Falsifiable

And

(L) “All human beings live forever” (the latter) => NOT Falsifiable

Now, I suspect on reading this back, you may say “I typed that in wrong, and put in a ‘not’ where there should not have been one” and hold that (F) is not falsifiable. Proving a universal negative is problematic, remember? What would the falsification of (F) look like?

For (L), all we would need is one dead human being, and (L) is falsified. That’s a mark of “good epistemic DNA” for (F) even if it happens to be easily falsified; at least it might be shown to be wrong, which, again, is more than we could say for Aquinas’ First Way.

(F) I think I could see as falsifiable, but only with stretching one’s limits for “in principle”, and forget “in practice”. To falsify (F) one would have to (somehow? how?) make sure every other human being anywhere is dead, and then kill oneself. Even then, it’s not clearly falsification, just because at that point the self nor anyone else is available to recognize the falsification, or to determine (F) was falsified. I think we’d rather understand that (F) is unfalsifiable in transcendental terms; the only conditions under which (F) would be falsified are conditions where falsification cannot happen (all humans are dead)!

(I suppose the way around that is to hand off the analysis to capable non-humans – intelligent aliens or something who could realize the falsification of (F) by verifying (how?) that all humans were dead.

At any rate, the epistemic effects of falsification are not just the “reverse side of the coin” for verification. We know by eliminating the falsified, which is not the same as ‘knowing by verifying’. This was the fatal flaw in verificationalism and logical positivism; verification is woefully underspecified. Falsification is well specified, just because it doesn’t “find truth”, but “finds untruth”.

So, if this is what you mean by asserting that Saint Thomas is not scientifically falsifiable, then nothing useful, IMHO, has been said.

I don’t think I said “scientifically falsifiable”. I was just claiming it’s not generally falsifiable. No lab coats or Bunson burners needed. What would the world need to look like, how would such a world appear to us if Aquinas’ First Way was indeed false? What is the criterion one would use to establish the falsification of Aquinas’ claim? I remind you that I’m not thinking about objections, but falsification criteria.

As a matter of knowledge, if the argument admits of no means for falsification, even in principle, no matter WHAT the evidence, observations, or experience we could imagine, there isn’t any “wrong” or “right” to be distinguished. You couldn’t know it was false EVEN IF IT WERE FALSE.

That is, barring some criterion for establishing such which you have yet to furnish.

(I’ve been waiting to use that word, “useful,” in this thread somewhere! I believe that the ‘usefulness’ proposition that is so over-used to prove theses is long overdue to be stricken from the language regarding such propositions: even astrology and Eckankar claim to be "useful’ - and, probably are, to some extent, however minute.)

OK, fine. But falsification is an epistemic principle. It provides the basis for classifying propositions as meaningful in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, as distinct from propositions where ‘true’ can’t be distinguished from ‘false’, even in principle.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

jDaniel:

One other point I’d like to make has to do with the word, ‘metaphysics’. I’m not sure when the word came to be bastardized to mean improvable, and in a bad way.

For the same reason we value falisification as a criterion for knowledge: metaphysics doesn’t get its shoes on and even wander onto the field of knowledge. It doesn’t put itself at epistemic risk; if it did, it wouldn’t be metaphysics, but physics. Metaphysics is the trivial (epistemically trivial – it may be super important and emotionally paramount psychologically, etc.) truths, the tautologies we lay over propositions that do put themselves at risk of falsification, which get their shoes on and make themselves liable to the verdict of real world evidence and observations.

That certainly was not its origin. It originally meant, and still does, actually: the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things , including abstract concepts such as being , knowing, substance, cause, identity, time , and space. - Oxford Dictionaries (bolding is mine)

God bless,
jd

I agree. Like many other areas of human development, “knowing” in that sense is archaic, obsolete, with respect to newer and more substantial heuristics for qualifying knowledge. “First principles of things” is exactly the problem, the root of the epistemic error. Classification as a “first principle” makes it trivial, inert. We have to start somewhere, so we have stimulus inbound and intuition/instinct. But metaphysics is chiefly superstitious, even for scientists, as much as anyone else. The difference being that we’ve come to understand it as superstition, and so we embrace heuristics that relegate metaphysics to the minima necessary to bootstrap our investigation (i.e., we embrace the superstition that reality is real and our sense reflect the world in some (semi-)intelligible way, because we MUST).

The “epiphany” as it were is that metaphysics beyond that (theology in large part, then) is… gratuitous superstition, intuition that is both incorrigible and unnecessary.

OK, so far as I can tell, we are still without a criterion for falsification of Aquinas’ First Way. Do I have that right? If not, what do you suppose the world should look like for us so that we would conclude that Aquinas’ First Way had been falsified?

-TS

 

[JDaniel]

OK, noted. But here, it’s fortuitous that MindOverMatter said what he did, because my reply is already in the record on this: you can’t falsify a definion. A definition is an assocation, and words mean whatever we choose them to mean. The associations are up to us. So when you say your definition of ‘motion’ is more broad – much more broad – than the physics defintion, I just nod. That’s fine. Nothing has been established about the real world, or tested against it. We’re just establishing our definitions.

TS:

If one were to place ‘association’ on the left and
noun

1. a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary. an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something:
   the action or process of defining something. - Oxford Dictionaries on the right, one would have to admit that for early man definitions were more on the left side than the right side. But, as man memorized the words he learned, and learned them by using them in contexts, and making synonyms based upon making a phrase easier for someone else to understand, man was able to move more and more to the right such that even we posters can know the exact meaning of words. Now, when we define words, there is a logic behind them that assures us that we are not juxtaposing words randomly. Otherwise, we’d be back in the stone age, grunting and growling. Then, we would be making mere ‘sounds’, without any reference to the things they are the ‘signs’ for, and without any reference to signs that do not have referents. So, I guess you can see that I strongly disagree.

When terms (and thus their definitions) get marshalled into an argument about reality, then we have something we can look to with an eye toward falsification.

This is not true when a conclusion is deductive. A true deductive proposition instantly denotes verisimilitude. Usually it’s a slap-on-the-head awareness.

Propositions about the state of the world are at least potentially falsifiable. A definition is not. This is easy to get tripped up on because many definitions do point to concepts that are used in propositions about the real world.

Actually, even lone words themselves can indicate a proposition. Take, for example, the word, “verisimilitude,” which means of being true or real. It is nothing more than an abbreviated proposition in its usage that stands in place of many words to convey the same meaning and intent: e.g., the detail gives the experiment verisimilitude.

The physics definition of ‘motion’ itself is no more ‘true’ or ‘false’ than Aquinas’. But it refers to spatial dimensions, which also happen to be concepts physics uses (like motion) in it’s models, in its propositions about the the way nature works. So it’s easy to confuse the truth of spatial dimensions as concepts that correspond to our observations with the ‘truth’ of the physics definition of ‘motion’.

It would help me immensely if you would give me an example of: “But it refers to spatial dimensions, which also happen to be concepts physics uses (like motion) in it’s models, in its propositions about the the way nature works.”

Furthermore, it is not a question of whether or not the definitions are “true” or “false;” it has always been a question of ‘meaning.’ When I tell someone that a thing is moving, in order to explain it I may point to some entity that is, in fact, moving. I do not point to the invisible line between the beginning and ending points of a trajectory. A thing that is undergoing some sort of propulsion is what I call “real world.” Physics needs to know trajectory and distances and speeds in order to make things: IOW, to make artificial things.

OK, here we come to a problem, ironically, involving definitions. I understand ‘there is no first mover’ or “I am not convinced there aren’t many ‘first movers’” to be objections, but not falsifications. To object is not to falsify. Falsification is dispositive, a conclusion that proceeds from the evidence. An objection may simply be ingorance, or disagreeability. It may be more, too, and still not falsification. Perhaps there are an infinite chaing of Prime Movers… could be.

From Wikipedia: Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion could be shown false by a particular observation or physical experiment. That something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather, it means that if the statement were false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated. (some bolding is mine) IOW, objections are the first part of the dialectic process that ends in (possible) falsification. The evidence does not need to show anything. If anything, it needs to show how the falsification can be withstood.

continued . . .

 

[JDaniel]

continuation . . .

But it doesn’t matter. That isn’t demonstrable any more than that there is just one, or that there are none.

What you are trying to do is “limit” what is “demonstration.” The meaning of the word, “science,” was originally not merely limited to the modern sciences. Its original meaning was: science is a certain knowledge of things in terms of proper causes or reasons or principles, and demonstration is a syllogism that was productive of such knowledge. Demonstration is not just the laying out of a dissectible corpse, on a table, and performing experiments on its parts. In another thread, I showed how the dialectic incorporated by Walter Reed, in ascribing yellow fever to mosquito carriers, resulted in and from just such a demonstrative syllogism and dialectic. Was that not “science?”

There is no demonstration, or appeals to evidence and the state of the world around us in either of those objections. None whatsoever, which place those objections in the same epistemic void that Aquinas has placed himself with the claim that there is a Prime Mover. Aquinas’ claim, and the objections are all ‘not even wrong’, as there is no way, even in principle to discover the falsity of any of them, if they were in fact false claims.

Yes there is. The appeal to evidence and ‘the state of the world around us’ (whatever that is supposed to mean?) is the precise reason of the objection: “I do not ‘see’ God, therefore, He can’t exist.” IOW, I cannot control anything about Him, from my ivory tower laboratory, that affects exquisite me, and, if I can’t then I refuse to think of Him as existing. How is that not an appeal to evidence? What you have, in fact, done is use your own argument against your own claim. Your statement, in this last paragraph, is merely a naked assertion. It provides no evidence and no demonstration. I will not let you get away with that unchallenged, monsieur.

At this point, then, we have our first putative falsification, but as I understand it, confusion over what falsification entails, and conflation of objections with falsification. (An objection may potentially bring about falsification, but these objections hold out no such hope).

As I said, ‘objection’ is the beginning of the process of falsification. The ‘conflation’ thing, is pure naked assertion.

God bless,
jd

 

[Touchstone]

TS:

If one were to place ‘association’ on the left andnoun

1. a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary. an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something:
   the action or process of defining something. - Oxford Dictionaries on the right, one would have to admit that for early man definitions were more on the left side than the right side. But, as man memorized the words he learned, and learned them by using them in contexts, and making synonyms based upon making a phrase easier for someone else to understand, man was able to move more and more to the right such that even we posters can know the exact meaning of words. Now, when we define words, there is a logic behind them that assures us that we are not juxtaposing words randomly. Otherwise, we’d be back in the stone age, grunting and growling. Then, we would be making mere ‘sounds’, without any reference to the things they are the ‘signs’ for, and without any reference to signs that do not have referents. So, I guess you can see that I strongly disagree.

This is not true when a conclusion is deductive. A true deductive proposition instantly denotes verisimilitude. Usually it’s a slap-on-the-head awareness.

As any philosopher knows, producing a valid argument isn’t a challenge or interesting. You can train software to identify logical fallacies in the form of an argument.

The challenge for an argument is to be sound, that is, not just logically coherent, but having sound premises that combine with the form of the argument to produce a trustworthy conclusion. I’m sure you are aware of all that, that’s freshman level stuff. But the import of that is to say it’s deductive doesn’t help us. Aquinas’ argument rests on premises that are “beyond sound”, or “not even sound/unsound”, to press it against the “not even wrong” meme I have been advancing.

Per the First Way and it’s predication on infinite chains (Aquinas: " But this cannot go on to infinity…") you have a premise, on which the argument crucial depends, which is inscrutable, unfalsifiable. To worry about *dedutive *is to miss the problem, that the soundness is entirely opaque to you, and to me. You wouldn’t be able to tell if that premise was false, even it is false.

Actually, even lone words themselves can indicate a proposition.

Yes, but the map is not the territory. A lone word we can associate (you used “indicate”), and what is pointed to can be any concept you like, complicated, simple, propositional, mathematical, whatever.

Take, for example, the word, “verisimilitude,” which means of being true or real. It is nothing more than an abbreviated proposition in its usage that stands in place of many words to convey the same meaning and intent: e.g., the detail gives the experiment verisimilitude.

Yes, tracking – we associate the word with the concept. Symbol points to referent.

It would help me immensely if you would give me an example of: “But it refers to spatial dimensions, which also happen to be concepts physics uses (like motion) in it’s models, in its propositions about the the way nature works.”

There are lots of different ways we can define ‘motion’, as you’ve ably pointed out. The physics definition uses (points to) terms and concepts from physics models that are performative in terms of physics’ goals. There’s nothing necessary about “motion” that has it necessarily invoking “space”, as your alternate, Thomist definition shows. One isn’t more true than the other. The physics definition is just the definition used (if an abbreviated form of it) in physics, and so it is used by “true” physics, true insofar as one supposes physics really does establish real knowledge about the world.

The definition can’t establish any truth of falsehood about the way the world works. It’s just an arbitrary association. A definition can, however, be used in propositions, arguments and models that do provide epistemic grounds for truth and/or knowledge.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

JDaniel:

Furthermore, it is not a question of whether or not the definitions are “true” or “false;” it has always been a question of ‘meaning.’

Yes. We have at least accomplished something good on this thread, by this!

When I tell someone that a thing is moving, in order to explain it I may point to some entity that is, in fact, moving. I do not point to the invisible line between the beginning and ending points of a trajectory. A thing that is undergoing some sort of propulsion is what I call “real world.” Physics needs to know trajectory and distances and speeds in order to make things: IOW, to make artificial things.

It isn’t important for the topic at hand, but even that which you point to, that kind of motion, is artificial, in the same way. If you stop a movie and look at it, none of the frames themselves “move”. The “motion” in motion picture is a construct in your head, whereby you make subconscious inferences that place “interstitial artificials” at all points in between frames. If in frame 1000 of a movie the hand is at location x,y,z and in frame 1001, it’s at x’,y’,z’, if the preceding frames support a “trajectory”, the mind interpolates that delta in the location of the hand, “artificializing” it as it does so. That’s why physics is effective, because it recreates the model that matches our experience.

Not a big deal, but you don’t “really” see motion any more than you see moving graphics in a single frame of a movie. That kind of motion is a very handy interpretive trick our brains have evolved to aid in rendering the world around us intelligible.

Alas, off topic again!

From Wikipedia: Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion could be shown false by a particular observation or physical experiment. That something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather, it means that if the statement were false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated. (some bolding is mine) IOW, objections are the first part of the dialectic process that ends in (possible) falsification. The evidence does not need to show anything. If anything, it needs to show how the falsification can be withstood.

continued . . .

You haven’t gotten to the very first part, yet, even. You haven’t shown me the falsifiability or refutability of the First Way as a logical possibility that can be shown. The Wikipedia paragraph says it better than I have – more concise, anyway. The First Way may not be false. But if the premises are false, as it stands, we have no way to demonstrate it. It can’t be shown, forget in practice, even in principle it cannot be shown. Per this, then, also, the First Way is unfalsifiable.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

continuation . . .

What you are trying to do is “limit” what is “demonstration.” The meaning of the word, “science,” was originally not merely limited to the modern sciences. Its original meaning was: science is a certain knowledge of things in terms of proper causes or reasons or principles, and demonstration is a syllogism that was productive of such knowledge. Demonstration is not just the laying out of a dissectible corpse, on a table, and performing experiments on its parts. In another thread, I showed how the dialectic incorporated by Walter Reed, in ascribing yellow fever to mosquito carriers, resulted in and from just such a demonstrative syllogism and dialectic. Was that not “science?”

Don’t know and don’t care, for the purposes of this thread. It doesn’t matter if you call it science or not – I think we could define that term any number of ways depending on our goals, and it doesn’t matter.

What I’m interested in is identifying the conditions whereby YOU would consider Aquinas’ First Way argument falsified.

From that, I’d like to see if those conditions are ones we can share in a collective, objective way, but that’s gravy. Really, it would great progress and the validation of our investment in this thread just to identify what YOU hold as the criterion for falsification of the First Way. Doesn’t matter if you call it science or not.

What would the world look like, what would the evidence be such that you would conclude that the First Way is falsified?

That doesn’t mean “show that the First Way is false”. Rather, establish the conditions whereby if the premises were false, we could identify its falsehood, if the premise is false.

That’s all. No need to get bogged down in the history of science as background on whether “science” is a label we want to use.

Yes there is. The appeal to evidence and ‘the state of the world around us’ (whatever that is supposed to mean?) is the precise reason of the objection: “I do not ‘see’ God, therefore, He can’t exist.”

Well, that’s very easy objection to shoot down. Perhaps God is real but invisible. On the evidence, one’s hard pressed to support belief in God, but you can’t prove a universal negative. Or, apropos to this discussion, you can’t falsify what is unfalsiable in principle. This is the poverty of theism-unaccountable-to-evidence. There is no way to falsify “God exists”, as there’s no way to do an adequate, let alone exhaustive search whereby would could say that the proposition is falsified.

To take on myself what I asked you: I can find NO circumstances, none at all, under any conditions conceivable where I could consider “God exists” to be falsified. For any given set of evidence or configuration of the world, I could always posit that there is a god in there, behind there, through it all, or somehow apart from it all that I just haven’t been able to identify.

So that assertion is unfalsifiable.

IOW, I cannot control anything about Him, from my ivory tower laboratory, that affects exquisite me, and, if I can’t then I refuse to think of Him as existing. How is that not an appeal to evidence?

It is an appeal to evidence. That’s what we operate for building our models. You say here “Yes there is”, ostensibly to my claim that there is no way to falsify the First Way argument. I don’t see any way to falsify it, and you do. So you have knowledge I don’t.

What is the way to falsification???

What you have, in fact, done is use your own argument against your own claim. Your statement, in this last paragraph, is merely a naked assertion. It provides no evidence and no demonstration. I will not let you get away with that unchallenged, monsieur.

See above on God’s existence. You don’t produce evidence for what does not exist. If there was evidence, and demonstration, you would necessarily have existence. If there is no way to falsify the First Way, and I cannot identify one, nor can anyone else I’ve asked (if you can point me to somewhere/someone else who establishes the criterion for falsification, that’d be fine).

That is what we conclude when we cannot conceive of a way to falsify; we have no way to falsify. If you know better for the First Way, I’m all ears.

As I said, ‘objection’ is the beginning of the process of falsification. The ‘conflation’ thing, is pure naked assertion.

God bless,
jd

So long as objections aren’t being confused with falsification, I’m good. Objections as objections don’t bear on the question of falsifiability. At the end of the day, we return to the criterion. What is it? What does the world need to look like in your view such that you would say “Yep, Aquinas’ First Way is falsified”. Unless we can understand that, we don’t have any basis for supposing the First way is “even wrong”.

-TS

 

[JDaniel]

Here is an important distinction. Per your definition all motion requires a prior situation. And that’s fine (see upthread) as definitions go. But the definition is not the world, and a chosen definition may be highly compatible with what we observe in the world around us, or not at all, or somewhere in between.

TS:
I would rather say, all motion requires a prior extant mover, and, all composite mobile beings require a prior extant mobile being to bring them into being. And: that is the world.

Simply defining motion to be contingent on a mover establishes your defintion (and that’s useful for meaning and understanding), but it doesn’t correspond to the world until such correspondence is shown.

Well then:
Any motion and/or change, which is the act of the potential qua potential, of any composite or non-composite being is dependent upon another composite or non-composite being already in existence.
But there are no mobile beings that exhibit self-motion, other than the trivial local motion of already existing composite, mobile beings that were themselves brought into being by already extant beings.
Therefore, all motion is the act of the potential qua potential as introduced in the potency for otherness in mobile beings by already existent beings or being.

For example, if I were to define ‘motion’ as ‘change in location through absolute space’, I can establish meaning and understanding with that definition – lots of natural philosophers of the past understood there to be some ‘aether’ or ‘absolute space’ (Newton was such a one) – but I haven’t reshaped reality with my definition. It either comports with our observations and empirical analysis or it does not.

Precisely the point: in order for a demonstration demonstrated to be a demonstration to have ultimate real world meaning, the demonstration must be able to toss out the dialectic that it was dependent upon in order that it could be demonstrated to be a demonstration. Newton’s theory cannot toss out its dialectic. Why? Precisely because there is no absolute space for him in which to demonstrate his theory, at least an absolute space that is accessible. Fortunately for us, his definition, while useful in some ways to physics, tells us nothing about motion: it merely indicates a trajectory, a path. How can a mere path tell us what motion is? You might as well say that “thunder is the collapse of a vacuum caused by a lightening bolt.” While that is trivially true, it is not enough. My three and a half year old granddaughter would look at me like I was crazy.

Now, Newton and the rest of the ‘absolute frame’ crowd were shown to be mistaken with the success of GR developed by Einstein. Any definition of ‘motion’ depending on ‘absolute space’ was a problem as a model for our world, but remained just what it was in terms of meaning and clarity. As a definition, it still works great. It just doesn’t fit into the best physical models we now have.

Tell me of one.

To Newton’s credit, though, he advanced claims or hypotheses that were at least potentially false.

But, that was easy to see, as I pointed out: his theory could not let go of its dialectic.

He could have been wrong, and in this case, he was wrong, judging by the evidence we have available. Absolute space as a distinguished frame of reference or a means for identifying ‘absolute rest’ or ‘absolute motion’ has been falsified by modern physics.

I repeat, tell me of one.

I bring that out here as a example of what Aquinas’ claims here lack. There is no “Michaelson/Morley Experiment” to which Aquinas’ ideas are liable. Newton’s ideas were falsifiable, where as Aquinas’ are not, to the credit of Newton. If you can be shown wrong, possibly, you can possibly be right. If you can’t possibly shown wrong, ‘right’ is only a trivial label.

I’m sorry, but, this is absurd. Much to the discredit of Newton, he did not know what the rules of demonstration were, yet he attempted to play in the game. His attempt was like bowling while blindfolded – with no one to point him in the direction of the pins.

Again, this may be an objection, but neither “motion is infinite” or “motion is finite” are falsifiable, even in principle. There is no state of the world we could point to where we have warrant for concluding the idea is shown to be false.

But, this is precisely what you were just lauding Newton for. You can’t have it both ways. Nevertheless, the assertion that the finitude of motion is non-falsifiable is irrelevant, if by that you are implying that there could be no one around for that long to verify it one way or the other. If that is the case, then the same goes for Newton’s axiom. Thankfully, for the case for Saint Thomas, such a construct is unnecessary: Saint Thomas is perfectly able to toss out the dialectic previously necessary for its veracity. Saint Thomas did not require an absolute vacuum.

This is a claim that is only verified by standing outside of our physical context; on the ‘inside’ of this universe, all motion can be explained as ultimately finite or infinite. One may object and deny the other. But they are toothless objections, inert claims. Neither is in any danger from the other. Neither can be shown to be false on the evidence we might possibly encounter.

continued . . .

 

[JDaniel]

continuation . . .

Not so. All motion can only be explained as finite. Creation, which is not motion, per my definition, has been around for nearly 17 billion years. During this time, no thing has remained the same. All things have changed, re-combined, fallen apart or disappeared down a black hole to where or what we don’t know. We can infer, just as science does, that neither motion nor mobile being are infinite.

Thus far, we have objections, but no means or tests for falsification to Aquinas’ argument in the First Way.

Yes we do: all we need to do is find something that has remained for 16.75 billion years that was not created.

Don’t know. It’s not clear. There is no experiment we can even conceive of, let alone practically perform that would be decisive either way. There is no Michaelson/Morley available for the First Way. Any and all phenomena can be accounted for by either ‘mobile being is finite’ or its negation: ‘mobile being is NOT finite’.

Hmmm?

No, that is not entailed by infinite time,

What!

We can muse and wonder, and affirm or object as we think it fits with our intuition, but there is no way to adjudicate this question based on the evidence and tests we can apply from the world around us.

Naked assertion.

For Newton and his distinguished frame, there SHOULD NOT have been results forthcoming from Michaelson/Morley as we observed (and have corroborated in a dozen and more separate ways as well).

Really? Why is it called the “called the most famous failed experiment to date.” Granted, there have been offshoots of the experiment that have been useful, but, to date, it is still considered “failed.”

The “should” from Newton was objectively determined, and was entailed by his model. We can’t establish anything this way toward either ‘infinite’ or ‘finite’, per Aquinas, alas. Aquinas requires us to just… accept it if it comports with our intuition. Experiments and experiences in the real world can’t help.

And thus, experience does not equal experimentation in any way, I suppose? Toss ‘intuition’ into the compost heap – with the rest of the inedibles.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Indeed, but I suspect we have nearly opposite ideas of what makes a poor or proper definition as regards the state of the world around us.

TS:

I suspect that on this one point you might be correct.

Yes, but that is why falsification is so crucial as a foundation for knowledge. Hypotheses and postulations abound, and many cannot be dismissed *a priori. *‘Absolute space’ might have been right on, if the universe were structured differently. It might have been true, and relativity falsified. That’s why we need falsification, to provide some epistemic grounds for dismissing some of the candidates.

So, therefore, the hypothesis of a hypothesis is the is the true and proper way of ‘handling’ this?

So here you have a competing idea, that the universe is part of an eternal chain, stretching back infinitely, and now you are stuck. You have no way to discredit that idea nor your idea based on what we observe, test or see happening around us.

Absurd: we are here now! In finite time. As finite beings. In a finite universe. Shall we test for these? Or, hasn’t science already done that? Numerous times?

Even a “Big Bang”, as “start-like” as I can think of for a universe could possibly be just one link in an infinite chain. If it were, we wouldn’t know any better. If weren’t we wouldn’t know any better, either. Neither the affirmative or denial of that idea is even possibly in danger of being falsified by our experiences in the world.

And, therefore, it is a trivial pursuit?

If your claim were true, you’d have no way to show it. If it were false, you’d have no way to show it.

I already have. Again: demonstration is not experimentation.

And crucially, you have no way to tell, even in principle, which is false. Again this is straightforward to apply: if “infinite multiverse” or “finite multiverse” or “finite universe” or “finite multiverse” is false as a model of reality, what would you anticipate discovering that would be dispositive, effective in falsifying any or all of them, showing how that idea cannot work?

Persistent being.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Logic is productive, establishing new propositions. Definitions are associative, establishing “pointers” (“this” is related to “that”). Rules produce, definitions associate.

TS:
Wrong: ‘logic’ is productive of conclusion. Dialectic is productive of new propositions. Definitions are much more than merely associative. We have many words in our language that point to no ‘objects’, or that point to abstractions.

Shorter version: “productive” points at the “ergo” in a syllogism.

It does not. It points to what follows the "ergo.’

I think it’s more rudimentary even than that. It includes motion we’d describe as a “path”, of course, but in the famous “double slit” experiments, we are confronted with ‘no path’, or ‘all paths’ or ‘parts of every possible path, not none realized’ between our points of observation, depending on how you interpret quantum weirdness and “summing over paths”. I’m not sure it’s important to what you’re saying here, but if it is, physics ‘motion’ isn’t a measure of a path, or even all paths, but maybe a probability function we can sum over all possible paths. “Motion” as a path we can measure doesn’t work at the quantum level.

You are talking about reflecting light through and from mirrors, to determine whether an aether can be attributed. But, motion as I, and Saint Thomas and Aristotle, have described it, is necessary to it, but, not defined or even described by it. It is simply an example of motion.

Motion in this case is the change in location over time. The intermediate points or paths may be conceptually problematic (and are), but no matter, we understand motion to have occurred if location changes over time.

Inferentially. But, Grampa, that’s not thunder! :crying:

It’s crucial, all the way down. motion is a function of energy, so where motion occurs we have necessary implications concerning mass and energy, according to our physics models.

These are examples of mobile beings. Not a description of motion as moving.

That is, physics as a model understand motion (location change over time) to have necessary ramifications for other dynamics, and so that definition is “physics compatible”. If motion were “no more than a static line”, our models would break that use that definition. A definition isn’t “true” or “false” on its own, but that particular one would not be effective in our model, so we’d have to choose another one.

This is amazingly boring. If I were trying to build an artificial something, I might have use for it. But, it teaches me nothing of the real world.

In any case, though, definitions are just tools. What provides utility and knowledge are models. Models use terms and concepts that carry semantics (have definitions), but the “truth” and utility comes from the model, not the definitions.

Like Saint Thomas’ description of motion.

OK. Could be. So how do we test that? If you’re right, then adding in this missing factor in the equation should produce even more high performance models than what Popperian science produces. What would you point me to as an example of this superior performing model that excelled due to incorporation of brute in the model?

Answers to very important questions.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

No, agreed. Falsifiability does not and cannot assure the veracity of any proposition. It can only establish that it can be meaningful if that proposition is not falsified. It may be falsified, and those shown the door, but it may also be falsifiable-but-unfalsified, which means it has epistemic weight a trivial proposition does not have, just by virtue of being falsifiable. “All dogs go to heaven” isn’t subject to falsification for us, so its gossamer as propositional knowledge. “Gravitational pull dissipates according to the inverse square of the distance from the mass” is falsifiable, and therefore has value as propositional knowledge just because we could expect to find out it was false if it were actually false.

This is the key to Popper’s insight. Human knowledge is eliminative. What we call “true” as knowledge earns that position not by being “verified” in and of itself, but in being falsifiable, and yet avoiding falsification. If multiple competing explanations are be falsifiable and yet are not falsified, we look to economy as a preference, preferring parsimony among the unfalsified-but-falsifiable candidates (and that heuristic fails us at points, too).

TS:

I envy your descriptive abilities! And, I am OK with the above.

The importance of Popper is that he turned our criteria for knowledge on its head: Knowledge isn’t “verifiable” or “provable” per se. Rather it is what’s left standing after all falsification efforts couldn’t touch it. That’s why it’s crucial that a proposition be falsifiable in principle, at least, because if it is not, it will be easily be mistaken for knowledge. You can’t falsify what’s unfalsifiable, and if knowledge obtains in the “absence of falsification for potentially falsifiable propositions”, then admitting unfalsifiable proposition cheats your epistemology and represents pseudo-knowledge.

But, the “propositions” of Saint Thomas are past the point of the dialectic where falsification needs to be introduced. You are treating his descriptions as though they are new. Furthermore, we know, intuitively, that such things as astrology and pseudo-science are false. They don’t require falsification - well, maybe for some people!

If, after thousands of trials, where the deer never catch on to your presence until you are upon them in your black far, and any other color has them running off from you when you a hundred meters off and more, you have much better grounds to accept the Black Fur Idea as knowledge. It might have been falsified, and per the performance of gray fur and brown fur (fail!) we expect if black fur wasn’t effective, we would have seen different results. So we understand the idea to falsifiable, yet unfalsified in that case. As “verified” as “verified” gets – the more chances to be falsified passed without falsification the better.

And this is perfect for modern science.

I think we need to check defintions, again. I understand “brute” as your using it here (e.g. brute force, brute fact) to mean “purely physical”. As such that establishes… physicality, but it doesn’t address anything regarding ‘knowledge by intuition’. I think you are referring to percepts or raw stimuli, which I agree are not deniable, but self-evident (again, by definition; if it’s not self-evident it’s not a brute stimulus).

Brute exigencies are knowable things, the descriptions of which can often be understood without falsification.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

That’s incorrect. It’s not symmetric. As you have it here:

(F) “No human being lives forever” (the former) => Falsifiable

And

(L) “All human beings live forever” (the latter) => NOT Falsifiable

TS:
Yes, you are correct. I don’t know how I ended up switching the statements. Mea culpa. I remember lots of correcting and cutting and pasting, at about that time, as I was working from a copy in Word. And, the evening was wearing thin.

Now, I suspect on reading this back, you may say “I typed that in wrong, and put in a ‘not’ where there should not have been one” and hold that (F) is not falsifiable. Proving a universal negative is problematic, remember? What would the falsification of (F) look like?

Not sure, but, I’ll bet it would be huge!

For (L), all we would need is one dead human being, and (L) is falsified. That’s a mark of “good epistemic DNA” for (F) even if it happens to be easily falsified; at least it might be shown to be wrong, which, again, is more than we could say for Aquinas’ First Way.

But, we’re not finished; you’re jumping the gun, as they say in racing lingo.

(F) I think I could see as falsifiable, but only with stretching one’s limits for “in principle”, and forget “in practice”. To falsify (F) one would have to (somehow? how?) make sure every other human being anywhere is dead, and then kill oneself. Even then, it’s not clearly falsification, just because at that point the self nor anyone else is available to recognize the falsification, or to determine (F) was falsified. I think we’d rather understand that (F) is unfalsifiable in transcendental terms; the only conditions under which (F) would be falsified are conditions where falsification cannot happen (all humans are dead)!

I told you it was big!

(I suppose the way around that is to hand off the analysis to capable non-humans – intelligent aliens or something who could realize the falsification of (F) by verifying (how?) that all humans were dead.

Imagine: if they wanted us all dead all along.

At any rate, the epistemic effects of falsification are not just the “reverse side of the coin” for verification. We know by eliminating the falsified, which is not the same as ‘knowing by verifying’. This was the fatal flaw in verificationalism and logical positivism; verification is woefully underspecified. Falsification is well specified, just because it doesn’t “find truth”, but “finds untruth”.

And, if I were to say to you that, “After all of the rupees, dollars and yen that has been spent on scientific achievement, all I see as the result of it is that certain of its artificial constructions have made living a little more enjoyable, but I cannot tell you how much so;” what would you say to that?

I don’t think I said “scientifically falsifiable”. I was just claiming it’s not generally falsifiable. No lab coats or Bunson burners needed. What would the world need to look like, how would such a world appear to us if Aquinas’ First Way was indeed false? What is the criterion one would use to establish the falsification of Aquinas’ claim? I remind you that I’m not thinking about objections, but falsification criteria.

It was inferred within the structure of it. Falsifiability is something that may be quite necessary for ‘science’ - although I cannot tell you how much it is.

OK, fine. But falsification is an epistemic principle. It provides the basis for classifying propositions as meaningful in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, as distinct from propositions where ‘true’ can’t be distinguished from ‘false’, even in principle.

As much as you like to think that falsifiability is the alpha and omega of philosophic demonstration, I do not. As I admitted, it may be necessary in science. But, knowing that one ought not place one’s hand on a red hot burner, does not need falsifiability. That the truth of that is merely intuitive does not render it less noble, or true.

God bless,
jd.

 

[Touchstone]

As much as you like to think that falsifiability is the alpha and omega of philosophic demonstration, I do not. As I admitted, it may be necessary in science. But, knowing that one ought not place one’s hand on a red hot burner, does not need falsifiability. That the truth of that is merely intuitive does not render it less noble, or true.

God bless,
jd.

Hi jd,

Short on time for responding just now, but I did read your several responses, thank you. Will just offer this for now:

Setting aside the “alpha and omega-ness” of falsifiability of the First Way, can we get some closure on it’s status? I’m not pressing you on whether it’s necessary for science, but thank you for that understanding of your position. I’d like to know if you think the First Way is falsifiable, and if so, how would it be falsified?

I’m fine with “no, because I don’t think falsification is such-a-much”. That’s clarity between us, and that’s good. But I keep hearing your comments on everything but the question I’m politely trying to concentrate on, from the thread title right on down. Do you have a position on the First Way’s falsifiability, your esteem for falsification notwithstanding?

-TS

PS. Curious, your choice of the hot stove and danger. This is manifestly something humans do NOT know intuitively, but learn empirically. I’m the father of six children and my youngest two, identical twins who now four, both had the occasion to learn the lesson of hot surfaces the super-non-intuitive way within a couple days of each other, which I found interesting, a kind of parallel right of passage it seems in that case.

The reason any parent, six kids or no, has to be diligent in warning kids away from hot surfaces is that that is a great example of a perfectly non-intuitive bit of knowledge. They can’t intuit the danger – the glass on fireplace looks the same as it does when it’s cool, but… ouch! The child learns a painful lesson, and uses that sense experience as a way to (hopeful) apply some caution in similar situations. An 11month old doesn’t know, intuitively, that even “red hot” signals danger. But pain is a stern schoolmaster.

Anyway, that’s not to say you couldn’t have come up with an example of knowledge we commonly suppose is intuitive, but that was a peculiar choice, one that springs to mind as the perfect counterexample to what you were saying.

 

[JDaniel]

For the same reason we value falisification as a criterion for knowledge: metaphysics doesn’t get its shoes on and even wander onto the field of knowledge.

TS:

And, likewise, then, neither does ‘falsification’. If the word ‘falsification’ has no antithesis, it is nonsense. So, what would that word be? Hmmm? ‘Truification’? How would one truify a proposition? And so, it, too, is a criterion for knowledge. Ultimately, my question is, why just ‘falsification’? If a thing cannot be falsified, but can be truified, have we not accomplished the very same thing? That somethings can be falsified makes no sense unless some things can be truified. Thus, propositions, such as Newton’s axiom, which can be truified give it the verisimilitude it requires. The failure of Michelson-Morley is its ‘falsification’.

It doesn’t put itself at epistemic risk; if it did, it wouldn’t be metaphysics, but physics.

I can’t answer that. But, even physics has to have an antithesis. Or, again, it is nonsense. And, the word, metaphysics has to have an antithesis. With the word ‘order’ we have an antithesis: ‘chaos.’ What would the world look like if the antithesis of ‘physics’ were true?

Metaphysics is the trivial (epistemically trivial – it may be super important and emotionally paramount psychologically, etc.) truths, the tautologies we lay over propositions that do put themselves at risk of falsification, which get their shoes on and make themselves liable to the verdict of real world evidence and observations.

Yet, from the point of view of the truification of the concept, metaphysics is very important and very valuable. Thus it is not “only super important and emotionally paramount psychologically, etc.’”, it epistemically answers those questions we, as humans, can’t otherwise answer. E.g, what is “the religious man?” “What is the role of salvation?” “Is the wretchedness of man in need of salvation?” “Is there being?” “What is the reason for being, if such there be?” "In who’s eyes are we “wretched?”

I agree. Like many other areas of human development, “knowing” in that sense is archaic, obsolete, with respect to newer and more substantial heuristics for qualifying knowledge. “First principles of things” is exactly the problem, the root of the epistemic error. Classification as a “first principle” makes it trivial, inert. We have to start somewhere, so we have stimulus inbound and intuition/instinct. But metaphysics is chiefly superstitious, even for scientists, as much as anyone else. The difference being that we’ve come to understand it as superstition, and so we embrace heuristics that relegate metaphysics to the minima necessary to bootstrap our investigation (i.e., we embrace the superstition that reality is real and our sense reflect the world in some (semi-)intelligible way, because we MUST).

Well, I must say that I am not surprised by the above litany of anti-theistic, unsubstantiated assertions. Unlike you, I will not write a litany of naked assertions against science. I will simply tell the world that I think it has produced some neat stuff, but that it is in no way a stand-in for the requirement of men to become un-wretched. In fact, science is not even on that level - it can’t ever make us un-wretched. And we are wretched and you know it.

What is “evil?” This question has been asked many times within these forums. I define evil as any thing, or any system of beliefs that lures, or otherwise forces humans away from salvific attainment.

The “epiphany” as it were is that metaphysics beyond that (theology in large part, then) is… gratuitous superstition, intuition that is both incorrigible and unnecessary.

Again, this does not surprise me.

OK, so far as I can tell, we are still without a criterion for falsification of Aquinas’ First Way. Do I have that right? If not, what do you suppose the world should look like for us so that we would conclude that Aquinas’ First Way had been falsified?

I would suppose the world would be absolutely unknowable.

God bless,
jd