Skepticism & Falsifiability

There are at least two different definitions of certainty:

1. Certainty in the sense of probability (impossible to certain, false to true).
2. Certainty in the sense of what is unknown (what we are skeptical of) and what is certain (what we are sure of beyond a reasonable doubt).

Skepticism may be defined as:

1. Questioning and/or doubt. The opposite of certainty.
2. Habitual questioning and/or doubt, perhaps towards everything. This is usually what skepticism means in philosophy, and it could be distinguished by being called “philosophical skepticism”.

For this section, I tried my best to categorize a list of unfalsifiable claims into four categories that felt meaningful to me. I believe the claims in the second category are worth evaluating individually. I also believe that all the statements in the last two categories can be considered baseless unfalsifiable, since there is no evidence to support them. In any case, all these claims share one thing in common: They are unfalsifiable.

All the statements in the fourth category have the additional distinction of being composed of two or more logical propositions, rather than just one. This seems to suggest to me that motivated unfalsifiable statements of that nature cannot be written as a single logical proposition, unless there’s a counterexample(s) that I am unaware of.

The phrase is actually a popular misconception. Science can prove negatives. But the rationale behind the saying is worth unpacking.

What people usually mean: The intuition comes from the asymmetry of falsification. To confirm “X exists,” you need one observation. To confirm “X does not exist anywhere,” you’d theoretically need to check everywhere, an infinite or impractical search space. You can never rule out that the evidence is just hiding.

This asymmetry is real and useful in some cases. You can’t prove there are no black swans by only checking Europe. But you can prove there are black swans by finding one in Australia.

However, the saying is technically wrong. Science proves negatives routinely:

• There is no largest prime number (proven mathematically, which underlies scientific reasoning).
• Phlogiston does not exist.
• No perpetual motion machine can exceed thermodynamic limits.
• There is no planet between Mercury and the Sun (we’d have detected it).

These are all negative claims established with high confidence. The key is that a bounded or constrained claim is very provable. It’s unbounded existential claims that are the problem.

The real, more precise principle is: you cannot prove the absence of something from the mere absence of evidence, especially when your search is incomplete. If you haven’t looked everywhere, not finding something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

This matters most in debates where someone demands you “prove” their unfalsifiable claim is false. They may ask you to prove there’s no god, no invisible dragon in the garage, no undetectable ether. The burden of proof should sit with the positive claim, not with those who haven’t refuted it.

So, the saying is a shorthand for that burden-of-proof principle. It’s philosophically sloppy when interpreted as a literal statement.

In Randian Objectivism, Ayn Rand reserved the word “arbitrary” for referring to things for which there is no evidence in believing perceptually or conceptually. Arbitrary claims are not based on either direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. An arbitrary idea is a sheer assertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality. Holding arbitrary ideas is just as bad as holding false ideas, because the mind has corrupted its means of objectively identifying ideas in reality and abandoned its mechanism to correct errors. The severity of how bad it is to hold arbitrary ideas depends on the extent to which an individual allows those arbitrary notions to pervade their mind.

In the typology of unfalsifiable claims that I proposed, “arbitrary” claims can be either baseless falsifiable or beyond subjectivity.

Arbitrary beliefs highlight the importance that we add a critical requirement to our epistemological framework. In order for any idea to be deemed “possible”, it must have at least some evidence to back it up. Every possible concept must have at least some evidence to support it as a possibility.

Arbitrary statements should be treated as if nothing had been said. It’s not possible to make true, meaningful statements if those assertions were made without supporting evidence. A complete lack of evidence is always epistemically sufficient for deeming a proposition to be false. A complete lack of evidence fulfills the burden of proof for the people who vouch for a proposition’s falseness.

When deciding whether something is true or false, the Null Hypothesis is the default conclusion, unless there is evidence to prove otherwise (the Alternative Hypothesis).

Yes, every debater always has the burden of explaining what they believe to be true and arguing why they are right. This is especially true when arguing over things in the Abyss.

For example, when I first saw the r/Antinatalism subreddit, I noticed that a lot of a antinatalists claimed that the burden of proof was on the natalists. At the time, I thought that argument could’ve been true, since I lacked the necessary knowledge for critiquing it. After I stared into the Abyss, I decided that both sides have the burden of proof. Antinatalism and natalism are both just value judgments. They both sit in the Abyss, equally. Neither judgment is objectively better than the other.

People who state unfalsifiable claims always have a greater burden of proof, since there are many problems with unfalsifiable statements.

Implicit in every scientific discovery and knowledge claim we ever make should be the words: “According to all available evidence and knowledge, this is the correct conclusion”. If you think this way, then you will welcome new findings and discoveries as a way to expand your knowledge, not as a threat to your current thoughts and dogmas. Yes, we can still be proven wrong, but we can also acknowledge this when it happens and change our beliefs to stop being wrong.

Awareness-Understanding Matrix

The Impossible-Certain Continuum: Impossible, Possible, Probable, Certain.

Question: True, False, Maybe are equivalent to Certain, Impossible, and Unknown/Possible, right?

All knowledge that we acquire within our lifetimes is based on observations by our senses, the concepts we form, and the extent to which we can infer things with logic.

Each of the levels of certainty: impossible, unknown, possible, likely, and certain respectively correspond to deductive, not enough information, some evidence, ampliative evidence, and deductive evidence. Greater evidence correlates with greater certainty, lack of evidence correlates with greater skepticism.

The range of skepticism to certainty regarding a proposition’s truth value is the probability of some proposition’s truth value. Skepticism exists on a spectrum, just like how certainty, confidence, and possibility also exist on spectrums. Discretely, we can define the Skepticism-Certainty Continuum with the following terms: Total Skepticism / Unknown / Imaginary, Possible, Probable, Certain.

Note: The spectrum scales for probability and skepticism/certainty seem to blend together, especially in cases where one of the scales would not exist or would seem rather redundant.

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned” – Richard Feynman

Rational Vs Rationalized

• Rationalizing means that you are using reason to validate an action that was already unreasonable to begin with.
• Skepticism is important in order to avoid rationalizing unreasonable beliefs.

Template I For Stating Propositions With These Attributes:

• I am skeptical/./certain that:
  • Proposition P/Q/R/S/etc is: true/false/unknown/etc.
    • Because: [list reason(s) here].

Template II For Stating Propositions With These Attributes:

• The Probability (0.00 ≤ p ≤ 1.00) of:
  • Proposition P/Q/R/S/etc is: true/false/unknown/etc.
    • Because: [list reason(s) here].

Template III For Stating Propositions With These Attributes:

• I am skeptical/./certain that:
  • The Probability (0.00 ≤ p ≤ 1.00) of:
    • Proposition P/Q/R/S/etc is: true/false/unknown/etc.
      • Because: [list reason(s) here].

There is a difference between what can be inferred and what is shown to happen.

• Technically, inferred events don’t count as evidence.
• Evidence can only consist of stuff that has concretely already happened.

To make up for the lack of evidentials, we could invent a new terminology to distinguish between evidence, implications, and different things.

The less someone knows about the world, the more rational it is to be skeptical about everything. Skepticism becomes less useful when you have a large abundance of accurate knowledge about the world.

That being said, it is easy to see why skepticism had a fair amount of popularity as a movement in Ancient Greece. The Greeks knew very little about the world compared to what humanity knows today, and many of the Greeks beliefs were later proven to be incorrect (e.g. their polytheistic religion, creationism, they believed the world was made out of earth, fire, water, air, and aether). Additionally, elementary algebra, calculus, and many other mathematical fields were not discovered yet, and lots of other knowledge wasn’t known either).

Related: Intentional Discoveries Versus Serendipity.