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A comment on What’s so bad about Scientism?. Parent comment

Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by icen on Friday March 31, 2017 @04:51AM (#14002083)
How do you go about testing the hypothesis that 1 + 1 = 2? Not just showing that a particular physical representation obeys the logical laws of arithmetic, but to test the actual laws themselves.
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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by jamesrcole on Friday March 31, 2017 @04:52AM (#14002088)
The point is that it's not a hypothesis. Or, at least there are views about maths where it's not a hypothesis.
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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by icen on Friday March 31, 2017 @05:00AM (#14002119)
So it's something that's not a scientific hypothesis, but is considered knowledge!

(Or, if as in the other comment chain, 1+1=2 is too obvious, you can take any sufficiently non-trivial theorem of your choosing).

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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by jamesrcole on Friday March 31, 2017 @06:20AM (#14002450)
Under the view I'm describing any statement like that is a kind of definition, not something that is true or false.

You can investigate whether it is consistent with other definitions. I believe that doing so is empirical work, which I think is consistent with a broad notion of science

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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by acover on Friday March 31, 2017 @05:43AM (#14002308)
I could be wrong but if you wanted to test the hypothesis: given the rules of addition show that 1 + 1 = 2 can be deduced.

The experiment would be to go about the deduction. It is falsifiable.

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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by kijin on Friday March 31, 2017 @06:19AM (#14002445)
When we talk about falsification in modern science, we usually mean falsification through empirical experiment. It must involve data from the real world.

If you include thought experiments based on nothing but arbitrary axioms, a lot of crazy claims about supernatural beings and other metaphysical curiosities would also qualify as falsifiable. I'm not sure whether you'd like to go down that rabbit hole. Science is about understanding the actual physical world that we live in -- not some fantasy world no matter how internally consistent it might be.

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