-- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Sharalyn" <homeonthefarm@...> wrote: > > My undergraduate degree is in philosophy but I can't seem to grasp the > concept of FALSIFIABILITY, and why it is important. Can anyone explain it to > me in some way different than, say, what Wikipedia has to say about it? (I've > already read Wikipedia and came out as confused as ever on this topic.)
I'll gladly give it a shot. It is dear to my heart. If you have a claim that does not include any conditions under which it can be proven false, it falls outside the class of claims that can be tested as true or false. Science is only interested in those claims that can be tested as being true because it is interested in advancing human knowledge with a higher probability of accuracy to the way the world actually works. It has limits in application in the whole range of human knowledge, and ignoring those limits has been criticized. Let's look at some examples from TM: Claim: TM improves your life Evidence: If you feel better from TM that is TM working. If you feel worse from TM, that is also TM working through the principle of unstressing. If your life starts falling apart after doing TM, then this is your accelerated Karma at work and something good is still happening. So this claim of the movement has been formulated so that there is no experience that could refute it. No matter what happens, TM is improving your life. It is not a class of claims that science finds interesting, but religions are full of them. Claim: God is always looking out for you in loving grace. If your life is wonderful, that is the big guy looking out for you. If you life is full of the suffering of Job, it is God testing your faith, or just making you stronger, or just acting in mysterious ways that still do not refute the claim that he is looking out for you. Everything happens for a reason in this view, and that reason is always good from God. Now let's look at some more specific claims that can be falsified: TM improves scores on creativity and intelligence tests. It lowers blood pressure. These claims can be true or false and we find this out through testing. There is a condition where the tests might reveal that TM does not accomplish these specific things. The only way out of this clarity would be by having inadequate or poorly designed tests that do not actually test what is being claimed. Most marketed panaceas make claims in a form that is non falsifiable. By saying that TM improves any area of life we are saying that we can cherry pick any result that improve and ignore the ones that do not. Finally, not all beliefs we have about the world can be put in a falsifiable way. So it never reaches the rigor of testing and that is how we wing it through life. The area that matters to me personally is when a claim is deliberately put in a non falsifiable form when it could easily be put in a falsifiable form. I consider most of the claims of TM to actually be slippery versions of falsifiable claims, and often are presented as if they meet the rigor of being falsifiable without ever doing so. The Maharishi effect silliness would be a good example of this. Does that help? >
