Likewise for psychiatry, which justifies incredibly high levels of coercion on the basis of precise-looking claims about different kinds of cognitive impairment and their remedies.
You’re presenting a specific rule about manipulating logically necessary truths, then treating it as a vague heuristic and trying to apply it to medicine! Aaaaaah!
Suppose a physicist (not even a doctor! a physicist!) tries to calculate some parameter. Theory says it should be 6, but the experiment returns a value of 6.002. Probably the apparatus is a little off, or there’s some other effect interfering (eg air resistance), or you’re bad at experiment design. You don’t throw out all of physics!
Or moving on to biology: suppose you hypothesize that insulin levels go up in response to glucose and go down after the glucose is successfully absorbed, and so insulin must be a glucose-regulating hormone. But you find one guy who just has really high levels of insulin no matter how much glucose he has. Well, that guy has an insulinoma. But if you lived before insulinomas were discovered, then you wouldn’t know that. You still probably shouldn’t throw out all of endocrinology based on one guy. Instead you should say “The theory seems basically sound, but this guy probably has something weird we’ll figure out later”.
I’m not claiming these disprove your point—that if you’re making a perfectly-specified universally-quantified claim and receive a 100%-confidence 100%-definitely-relevant experimental result disproving it, it’s disproven. But nobody outside pure math is in the perfectly-specified universally-quantified claim business, and nobody outside pure math receives 100%-confidence 100%-definitely-relevant tests of their claims. This is probably what you mean by the term “high-precision”—the theory of gravity isn’t precise enough to say that no instrument can ever read 6.002 when it should read 6, and the theory of insulin isn’t precise enough to say nobody can have weird diseases that cause exceptions. But both of these are part of a general principle that nothing in the physical world is precise enough that you should think this way.
See eg Kuhn, who makes the exact opposite point as this post—that no experimental result can ever prove any theory wrong with certainty. That’s why we need this whole Bayesian thing.
Yes, of course things that aren’t definitive falsifications aren’t definitive falsifications, but there have been fairly definitive falsifications in physics, e.g. the falsification of aether theory. (Asking for a falsification to be literally 100% certain to be a falsification is, of course, too high of a standard)
Yes, it’s also possible to change the description of the theory so it is only said to apply to 99% of cases in response to counterexamples, but this is a different theory than one that says it applies to 99.9% of cases or 100% of cases. This is a matter of calibration.
You’re presenting a specific rule about manipulating logically necessary truths, then treating it as a vague heuristic and trying to apply it to medicine! Aaaaaah!
Suppose a physicist (not even a doctor! a physicist!) tries to calculate some parameter. Theory says it should be 6, but the experiment returns a value of 6.002. Probably the apparatus is a little off, or there’s some other effect interfering (eg air resistance), or you’re bad at experiment design. You don’t throw out all of physics!
Or moving on to biology: suppose you hypothesize that insulin levels go up in response to glucose and go down after the glucose is successfully absorbed, and so insulin must be a glucose-regulating hormone. But you find one guy who just has really high levels of insulin no matter how much glucose he has. Well, that guy has an insulinoma. But if you lived before insulinomas were discovered, then you wouldn’t know that. You still probably shouldn’t throw out all of endocrinology based on one guy. Instead you should say “The theory seems basically sound, but this guy probably has something weird we’ll figure out later”.
I’m not claiming these disprove your point—that if you’re making a perfectly-specified universally-quantified claim and receive a 100%-confidence 100%-definitely-relevant experimental result disproving it, it’s disproven. But nobody outside pure math is in the perfectly-specified universally-quantified claim business, and nobody outside pure math receives 100%-confidence 100%-definitely-relevant tests of their claims. This is probably what you mean by the term “high-precision”—the theory of gravity isn’t precise enough to say that no instrument can ever read 6.002 when it should read 6, and the theory of insulin isn’t precise enough to say nobody can have weird diseases that cause exceptions. But both of these are part of a general principle that nothing in the physical world is precise enough that you should think this way.
See eg Kuhn, who makes the exact opposite point as this post—that no experimental result can ever prove any theory wrong with certainty. That’s why we need this whole Bayesian thing.
Yes, of course things that aren’t definitive falsifications aren’t definitive falsifications, but there have been fairly definitive falsifications in physics, e.g. the falsification of aether theory. (Asking for a falsification to be literally 100% certain to be a falsification is, of course, too high of a standard)
Yes, it’s also possible to change the description of the theory so it is only said to apply to 99% of cases in response to counterexamples, but this is a different theory than one that says it applies to 99.9% of cases or 100% of cases. This is a matter of calibration.