Are non-testable hypotheses worthy of discussion?

[discovolante]

Well, are they?

[bob sterman]

If the hypothesis "non-testable hypotheses are not worthy of discussion" is not testable - then you have proved it is worthy of discussion by starting one...

[Woodchopper]

Yes.

There are lots of real world problems about which decisions need to be made before there is adequate evidence from research.

In such a case it is necessary to create hypotheses even if they can't be tested. But what can be done is to examine those hypotheses and pick what is assumed to be the best - eg are they internally consistent, which involve making fewer assumptions, which are most consistent with things that are better known. This process certainly isn't free of error, but its better than relying on guesswork or prejudice.

[Bird on a Fire]

I'm struggling to imagine an entirely untestable hypothesis, to be honest.

[noggins]

It depends, what do you mean by the terms "non-testable", "hypotheses", "worthy" and "discussion" ?

[warumich]

I should be doing my job right now, but...

There is a certain amount of philosophical history, and hence emotional baggage involved in this. Some of the caricatures of the Vienna Circle philosophers, following the early Wittgenstein, argued that any statement that is not testable is literally nonsense (I'm writing caricature here because their position was of course more nuanced than that, and there was considerable variation between individual philosophers too - and Wittgenstein himself famously later disagreed with his earlier work). A problem, apart from this being quite unintuitive, was that testable is itself a slippery concept, and lack of clarity of what testable actually is was what did it for the Circle's metaphysical obsession of getting rid of metaphysics. (Bob's observation that discussions about what testability is are themselves untestable was another nail in the project's coffin. Wittgenstein dealt with it with a ladder analogy, i.e. you need the ladder to climb up, but can discard it when you're there. So, you need metaphysics to reach the realisation that metaphysics is nonsense, and once you're there you can discard it. No, I don't think it worked either)

At which point, Karl Popper makes his famous tweak in definitions of testability by turning it into falsifiability, and the rest is history. It needs to be pointed out that falsifiablity is not the perfect solution Popper thought it was, but also that Popper never argued that non-falsifiable statements are nonsense or not worth discussing, but that they are merely not scientific. Which I think is a reasonable position to take (though I think even that softer interpretation is wrong).

My take on the whole discussion is that the Circle's metaphysical nonsense argument is quite gratuitous, i.e. you don't really need this as part of the wider philosophy they championed, and yet they were quite insistent on it. But I suppose you'll need to see this as part of times and contexts in which the Circle operated in, e.g. they wanted to take a science inspired position against the excessively metaphysical theory building that was fashionable on the continent, which by the time of the likes of Dilthey and Heidegger had become quite impenetrable. So, the testability criterion has become a convenient tool to dismiss arguments you don't like, and analytical philosophers have traditionally been far too happy slashing it about willy-nilly as a get out clause from having to engage.

I mean I'm happy with any arguments that give me an excuse not to read Heidegger. But the testability (or even the falsifiability) razor cuts too deeply into the flesh of science, and condemns, for example, all of history as nonsense.

[discovolante]

Woohoo i hope you'd post Warumich.

I need to do some work before lunch though, but thanks in advance.

[bjn]

I mean I'm happy with any arguments that give me an excuse not to read Heidegger. But the testability (or even the falsifiability) razor cuts too deeply into the flesh of science, and condemns, for example, all of history as nonsense.

Surely history is testable/falsifiable against the available evidence to some extent?

[JQH]

... But the testability (or even the falsifiability) razor cuts too deeply into the flesh of science, and condemns, for example, all of history as nonsense.

I'm not convinced about that. Sure, we can't go back in time and look but a statement such as "The Tudor monarchs were religious liberals." is easily falsifiable by documentary evidence dating from the era. So while it may be wronger than a Prime Ministerial statement by Boris Johnson, it is not nonsense in the philosophical sense.

[warumich]

Well ok fine, not all, but I was thinking about the larger questions like the causes of WWI - you can make reasonable discussion and so on, but these are not testable in any real sense.

[johnjohn]

What would have happened if Hitler had been assassinated in 1933? (Go to Godwin, move directly to Godwin...)

[snoozeofreason]

It depends, what do you mean by the terms "non-testable", "hypotheses", "worthy" and "discussion" ?

Us oldies recognise you. You are the ghost of C M Joad, uploaded to the internet. I claim my £5.

[secret squirrel]

I should be doing my job right now, but...

There is a certain amount of philosophical history, and hence emotional baggage involved in this. Some of the caricatures of the Vienna Circle philosophers, following the early Wittgenstein, argued that any statement that is not testable is literally nonsense (I'm writing caricature here because their position was of course more nuanced than that, and there was considerable variation between individual philosophers too - and Wittgenstein himself famously later disagreed with his earlier work). A problem, apart from this being quite unintuitive, was that testable is itself a slippery concept, and lack of clarity of what testable actually is was what did it for the Circle's metaphysical obsession of getting rid of metaphysics. (Bob's observation that discussions about what testability is are themselves untestable was another nail in the project's coffin. Wittgenstein dealt with it with a ladder analogy, i.e. you need the ladder to climb up, but can discard it when you're there. So, you need metaphysics to reach the realisation that metaphysics is nonsense, and once you're there you can discard it. No, I don't think it worked either)

At which point, Karl Popper makes his famous tweak in definitions of testability by turning it into falsifiability, and the rest is history. It needs to be pointed out that falsifiablity is not the perfect solution Popper thought it was, but also that Popper never argued that non-falsifiable statements are nonsense or not worth discussing, but that they are merely not scientific. Which I think is a reasonable position to take (though I think even that softer interpretation is wrong).

My take on the whole discussion is that the Circle's metaphysical nonsense argument is quite gratuitous, i.e. you don't really need this as part of the wider philosophy they championed, and yet they were quite insistent on it. But I suppose you'll need to see this as part of times and contexts in which the Circle operated in, e.g. they wanted to take a science inspired position against the excessively metaphysical theory building that was fashionable on the continent, which by the time of the likes of Dilthey and Heidegger had become quite impenetrable. So, the testability criterion has become a convenient tool to dismiss arguments you don't like, and analytical philosophers have traditionally been far too happy slashing it about willy-nilly as a get out clause from having to engage.

I mean I'm happy with any arguments that give me an excuse not to read Heidegger. But the testability (or even the falsifiability) razor cuts too deeply into the flesh of science, and condemns, for example, all of history as nonsense.

Although the Vienna Circle were very keen on Wittgenstein, his own philosophy as laid out in the Tractatus seems to me to be more of a kind of logical realism. He assumes the existence of certain fundamental propositions (which he does not claim are statements that can actually be articulated), he asserts that all meaningful statements boil down to Boolean combinations of basic statements, and he associates the meaning of a proposition with the conditions under which it is true according to its composition and the rules of truth tables (so 'statements' that can not be decomposed into basic propositions, and also tautologies and contradictions, are technically meaningless for him - though he confuses the issue by distinguishing between 'saying' and 'showing'). So for him the meaning of a proposition exists independent of any ability to verify it, while the classical Circle position was that testability in some form had to involved somewhere.

[science_fox]

I'm struggling to imagine an entirely untestable hypothesis, to be honest.

Quite a few of the advanced physics spacetime hypothesis/theories aren't directly testable. They may become so with 'bigger' 'telescopes' (or gravity metres or whatever). A lot of mathematical discussion still happens around them, and whether or not the 9th curled dimensions is a 'better' hypothesis than a resonating string to resolve this contradiction between quantum gravity and experienced universe, etc..

[discovolante]

I'm struggling to imagine an entirely untestable hypothesis, to be honest.

What prompted this thread was reading someone talking about Freud's 'death drive'. Which I suppose is a hypothesis as such, but I'm happy to be corrected.

I'm not looking for a discussion of the merits or otherwise of Freud in this thread though. I'd be happy for it to be in another thread though, as long as it wasn't just full of swearing. Could be interesting to hear about the usefulness or harmfulness (is that a word?) of his influence in psychology from people who have knowledge of that area.

[JQH]

Well ok fine, not all, but I was thinking about the larger questions like the causes of WWI - you can make reasonable discussion and so on, but these are not testable in any real sense.

Ah, got it. In cases like that you try to interpret the evidence we already have but there's never going to be any more evidence.

In which case the answer to the question in the title is "Yes".

But I guess that is debatable.

[Bird on a Fire]

Well ok fine, not all, but I was thinking about the larger questions like the causes of WWI - you can make reasonable discussion and so on, but these are not testable in any real sense.

Ah, got it. In cases like that you try to interpret the evidence we already have but there's never going to be any more evidence.

Well, you could experimentally replicate the purported causative conditions and see if a world war results.

First, catch your Archduke Franz Ferdinand...

[warumich]

Well ok fine, not all, but I was thinking about the larger questions like the causes of WWI - you can make reasonable discussion and so on, but these are not testable in any real sense.

Ah, got it. In cases like that you try to interpret the evidence we already have but there's never going to be any more evidence.

In which case the answer to the question in the title is "Yes".

But I guess that is debatable.

As I have found on here over the years, everything is debatable, even the abomination of well cooked steaks.

[dyqik]

As I have found on here over the years, everything is debatable, even the abomination of well cooked steaks.

That's a semantic issue, as Well Done steaks aren't steaks done well,

[Bird on a Fire]

And now we're back to Wittgenstein

[JQH]

How did he like his steaks?

[Martin_B]

He was a beery swine, so I'm guessing burnt to a crisp

[Allo V Psycho]

OK, I'm not a philosophically educated at all. But I've spent a lot of time and thought on research, so I have my own personal take on it. I don't want Warumich or Secret Squirrel to laugh out loud.

An initial idea, whether testable or not, I call (very quietly and normally only to myself) a 'Notion'. A Notion might be testable, or not testable, or its testable status is not yet clear to me.

If a test dawns on me, and I do the tests, then I elevate it to a 'Hypothesis' (so, in my Universe, non-testable hypotheses can't exist). The hypothesis might be sustained or contradicted. If contradicted, it can drop back down to notion. If 'sustained', it then becomes a 'Conditional Statement of Probability' (i.e. "Under the following conditions, the following hypothesis holds with this degree of probability"). It also has a 'Domain of Applicability' - the area over which it applies. Further experiments might increase the Domain of Applicability, and/or refine the conditions, and/or increase the degree of probability. 'Truth' never comes into it.

Of course, a further experiment might reduce the Domain of Applicability, possibly even to zero, then the hypothesis drops down to a notion again.

One of the reasons I like to think like this, is that it keeps me alert to the possibility that I might be mistaken, and reduces the pain of admitting that I was mistaken, if that is the way it turns out. I think this is because I can take small steps towards abandoning the hypothesis. I can think "Oh, this contradictory result just increases the conditions needed for the hypothesis to hold, or reduces the probability that it holds, or reduces the domain of applicability". At a certain point, it becomes relatively painless to abandon the hypothesis.

So, when it turns out that I was wrong (which is often the case) I can be philosophical about it. In the other sense of the word.

[JQH]

At which point does a hypothesis become a theory?

[dyqik]

At which point does a hypothesis become a theory?

When lots of other people assume it is true without feeling the need to insert a "if the <x> hypothesis holds,..." conditional, and without being required to by referee number 2.