Quote from stu: No it isnât. Come on Ricter you can do better than dancing around with some silly semantics , or then again perhaps you really canât.
Of course it is, verifiable is, imo, is certainly a chosen premise. Let me give a couple of examples.
There's subjective truth (eg, I like pie), inter-subjective truth (eg, we all dream but none of us can prove it) and objective truth, a fictitious state where, presumably, all of us agree on something like the sun rising every morning. Trouble is, the last type is a limit, never to be really achieved because, for that, you'd need everyone on the planet to agree to something, including the Greeks and the Irish (impossible.) Therefore you're left with subjective truth and various levels of inter-subjective truth. I saw colleagues at the Physics lab looking at the same monitor and not being able to agree on what they were reading - the guy with the funny cigarettes in his pocket would never oblige.
Trouble is, again, that we all know of situations where various "scientific" agreements were forged on the basis of necessity, ignorance or pressure. For example, many German scientists wrote essays how inferior the Jews are. Same with others who proved to us how inferior the Blacks are. Homosexuals are also frequent victims, etc.
What I'm saying is various groups adjust and even impose their own "scientific" norms of verifiability, aka what it takes to prove something. Scientifically of course.
Call it bad science? Perhaps, but we are full of it. I remember reading a few months ago that over half of the so called scientific data/papers out there are patently wrong. That's a lot. Half the people lie, that's all. And that list includes such notables as cold fusion, global warming, etc etc, perhaps even the very polular and almost universally respected General Theory of Relativity, given that the star in there, the graviton, has never been observed. Oh well.
