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Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by kijin on Friday March 31, 2017 @05:05AM (#14002142)
When you add 1kg of some stuff to 1kg of another stuff and end up with 1.97kg instead of 2kg, have you really falsified 1 + 1 = 2, or have you just confirmed that some portion of your material was vaporized in the reaction?

What does the number 1.97 even mean in a world where 1 + 1 ≠ 2? When you falsify 1 + 1 = 2, you also end up denying the validity of the very experiment that you used in the process. If a hypothesis can only be falsified by self-invalidating experiments, does it count as falsifiable?

Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by mizzao on Friday March 31, 2017 @11:13AM (#14004615)
Your experiment depends on the way your scale defines "1", "2", and "kg", and can't be used to test this.
Re:What’s so bad about Scientism? by kijin on Friday March 31, 2017 @08:20PM (#14009554)
That's the point. You can't design an empirical experiment to falsify the definitions of basic concepts.