Explain why unfalsifiability isn't a good demarcation criteria for science and pseudoscience

Explain why unfalsifiability isn't a good demarcation criteria for science and pseudoscience.

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because if it's unfalsifiable the only alternative is that it's true. QED.

If a theory is making enough accurate predications regardless something's going on

But what if the predictions it makes are completely expected?
Like a theory whose only major prediction is that another war will happen will get credence by that idea.
You want the prediction to have some chance of being false. Meaning the theory is falsifiable.

I asked some /sci/ fag if dark energy could be falsified and he seethed hard

Define "pseudoscience". Authors that appropriate scientific language are consciously subjecting the terms to deformation in order to function as representational vehicles for their own ideas. Why should they care about "falsifiability" when they never claimed to be empirically rigorous? And why would you deny language its inherent mutability?

Because feels are more important than reals bruh

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All theories are falsified in some respect at all moments in time.
Crucial experiments rarely ever happen.
Even if a crucial experiment falsifies a prediction of a theory, it is never straightforward what exactly in the theory has been falsified.

I dont know. Is it for example pseudoscience to wrench terms from Bergson and then misread Hegel so badly it wouldnt go past an undergraduate course, eh Karl?

True. I can't think of existing theories where there isn't some anomaly that is incongruent with it. We just keep the theory until something ties everything together better. Kuhn's description of scientific paradigms clearly fits how science actually evolves better.
I imagine if scientists actually took Popper seriously, they would have thrown away the atomic theory a long time ago because it went through way too many revisions.

"Falsifiability" comes to the conclusion that Evolution isn't scientific. Popper himself got behind this.

Think for yourself what this means for falsifiability as an abstract, general criterion.

If you found fossils in the wrong layers it'd disprove evolution. It's allowed us to predict in what layer we should find what kind of fossil with what kind of adaptation in its morphology.

> 17 Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; 18 That they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; 19 Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life. 20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: 21 Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.

Exactly, Popper's goal in conflating pseudoscience with science that's been discarded is to justify the pseudoscientific historical philosphies called political science and economics.
Discarded science is science, but pseudoscience is heresy.

First let me explain why using double negatives in a sentence isn't good.

Because to start with it purports to demarcate between science and not-science, which is different to false-science; science doesn't have a monopoly on truth. Science is secondary and dependent on logic, language, mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology etc. It operates within the assumptions and axioms of those prior domains.

*isn't not good

>If you found fossils in the wrong layers it'd disprove evolution
It reality they'd just say it's convergent evolution and handwave the fossil evidence away. Evolution goes beyond the limits of science and proposes a regulative teleological process to life and reproduction. That doesn't mean it's wrong or false, but it is demonstrative of the secondary nature of science to philosophy and the grounding of the former in the latter.

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This is true. If I see a white raven for the first time, I have falsified "all ravens are blacks" but also "all ravens are orange". But if the raven also happens to miss one leg, I will have falsified "all ravens have two legs". Unless I notice that leg was chopped off, in which case I may only have falsified "all raven keep having two legs all their lives" which seems like it didn't warrant falsification in the first place.

So it's not so easy to parse what of falsification lies in the empirical observation, and what lies in the discourse about the empirical observation.

This gets even messier when you bring statistics into the fold. If I observe all particles of a given time have no mass, but one of them suddenly appears to have a very small but nonzero mass, have I falsified the masslessness of those particles? Or have I just mistaken a measurement error for the real thing? So ultimately you need a sense of the distribution of the phenomena you're describing, and you need a degree of confidence on the reality of what you observe. It may very well be that criteria for what qualifies as scientific fundamentally depends on the scale and frequency of the phenomena you're studying.

That said falsifiability as a criteria is still important imo. Only it's not as clear-cut, as definitive, and as sufficient as a straight Popperian would have it.

See also Bachelard's take on falsifiability. He was subtler than both Popper and Kuhn on that count.

Evolution isn't inherently teleological.

Convergent evolutionary species have only superficial similarities besides the few adaptions in question that make them convergent. Their morphology will indicate their distinct lineage.

Having men of character is the most important thing, but this comment is why the playdoh academy was open only to men who understand math. Imperfect reproduction with selection makes evolution, sexual reproduction hopefully with your better half-genome and consciousness-driven selection make evolution faster.

Check out Carl Hempel's, 'Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes'

As an example, naive falsificationism entails that existential generalizations (claiming that a certain sort of thing exists) lack cognitive content.

>That said falsifiability as a criteria is still important imo. Only it's not as clear-cut, as definitive, and as sufficient as a straight Popperian would have it.
I think it is still important as one among many elements for describing what happens in the history and philosophy of science, but I really don't see falsification fulfilling its purpose of demarcating science and pseudoscience in any way except as ludicrous polemic.