Then what does this belief not allow to happen—what would definitely falsify this belief? A null answer means that your belief does not constrain experience; it permits anything to happen to you.
What if I had the belief that a certain coin was unfair, with a 51% chance of heads and only 49% chance of tails? Certainly I could observe an absurd amount of coin flips, and each bunch of them could nudge my belief—but short of an infinite number of flips, none would “definitely” falsify it. Certainly in this case, I could come to believe with an arbitrary level of certainty in the falsehood of the belief. But I don’t believe that would apply in general—what if to reach any arbitrary level of testing a belief, I’d need to think up and apply an indefinite number of unique tests? For example, a belief concerning the state of mind of another person—I can’t think of a definite test, nor can I repeat any test indefinitely to increase certainty.
On a related note, why abandon Bayes in this case for Popper, without any disclaimer? Eg falsificationism is useful because it fights magic explanations and positive bias, but it is still a predictive belief if observation causes you to slightly shift your probability for that belief.
What if I had the belief that a certain coin was unfair, with a 51% chance of heads and only 49% chance of tails? Certainly I could observe an absurd amount of coin flips, and each bunch of them could nudge my belief—but short of an infinite number of flips, none would “definitely” falsify it. Certainly in this case, I could come to believe with an arbitrary level of certainty in the falsehood of the belief. But I don’t believe that would apply in general—what if to reach any arbitrary level of testing a belief, I’d need to think up and apply an indefinite number of unique tests? For example, a belief concerning the state of mind of another person—I can’t think of a definite test, nor can I repeat any test indefinitely to increase certainty.
On a related note, why abandon Bayes in this case for Popper, without any disclaimer? Eg falsificationism is useful because it fights magic explanations and positive bias, but it is still a predictive belief if observation causes you to slightly shift your probability for that belief.
What caused you to believe a 51 % chance of heads versus 49 % chance of tails?