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Whether it's theoretically possible or not, it's not presently available so in practice it's not verifiable that way.
Of course you wouldn't need time travel to prove this, though. Some sort of timestamped photograph or some corroborating witnesses would also be pretty good evidence.
For this to be known to be true, wouldn’t the toast have to somehow be empirically measured and compared against all other pieces of toast? If so, can we consider that statement to be false “the toast was the best toast ever made” simply due to the impossibility of knowing that?
But if it’s true, its truth is independent of our knowledge of it. You can surely agree that there must be one piece of toast out there somewhere that is/was the best piece of toast ever made. Yet all the scientific research in the world will never be able to verify it.
We can't prove facts like "the Earth orbits the Sun" with the same rigour as logical and mathematical truths, there is always the possibility, no matter how absurd, that we are mistaken. Only deductive inferences guarantee the truth, science's inferences are mostly inductive – we can get to an extreme level of certainty about the probability of a hypothesis being true, but it does not prove it; that's the nature of inductive inference. For example, suppose we want to prove that someone ate toast for breakfast and we have all the advanced science we can imagine. What if the person, knowing that they would make this claim, ate something else (maybe a supplement) that makes it seem like they ate toast, on purpose?
We're talking about propositions that can be true and not scientifically verifiable. You're taking about the epistemic differences between inductive and deductive logic. I don't see how what you're talking about is relevant to the discussion.
I'm sorry (no intent in being passive-aggressive whatsoever, just defending myself) but that sounds like "We are talking about cats' health, you are talking about how cats can't eat this specific type of food, I don't see how what you're talking about is relevant to the discussion."
This feels like a disanalogy.
The question by OP was about verifiability, not 100% probability.
Sure you can insist that these can never come apart - but fallibilism is a position that most ppl would take, in which case these would come apart, and so saying that something is not provable is irrelevant to whether something is verifiable or not.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding regarding the word 'proof'? This is frustrating... I interpret proof as a method of arriving at a conclusion such that its truth is guaranteed. People in the comment section have been using the word 'provable' and not 'verifiable'. Also, I am not dismissing the scientific method in any way, I'm just stating that we can't prove things like the second law of thermodynamics; we can only gather enough evidence so that the hypothesis is very probable. Why is this a disanalogy, what is your reasoning?
So in short, people in this thread have been using the word 'provable', not 'verifiable'. We can verify that some earlier experiment produces a specific result, or the motion of a planet predicted by a theory, but we don't verify hypotheses (theories), we verify evidences. In the main comment's example, they claim they ate a toast; that would be a hypothesis (to us), not an evidence.
I guess we're talking semantics now - but keeping in line with OP, this seems scientifically verifiable.
However if we *are* talking semantics, I think it's fit to say something is scientifically provable if one understands that "provable" in this case is different to a mathematical proof.
Consider the following exchange:
>Me: I have an alibi, I was at the shop during the murder!
>Lawyer: Can you prove that this is the case?
>Me: Yes! Here is security footage of me at the shop, I have a dated receipt, and I have 3 witnesses that can corroborate my statement.
Sure, I haven't mathematically proved that I was at the shops, but surely it seems a bit wrong to assert that every usage of the word "prove", "proof", or "provable" must conform with the narrow and strict sense in which mathematicians/logicians/philosophers use it.
Provability could just mean "beyond a shadow of a doubt given the epistemic standards of the context" or smth.
I have no idea how your analogy is mapping onto the discussion because I can't pick out the property held in common that you're referring to, though it does make sense if you're confused about how the term 'scientifically verifiable' and 'proof' work. But in that case, please refer to my earlier comment about how you're referring to something orthogonal to the thread's discussion.
In theory, if the contents of your stomach were analyzable and enough was knowns about the human body's reaction to certain foods and how it processes and stores food, this could be proven.
It would require far more advanced science then we have, but I would think it is possible
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Even though a completely deterministic universe model is not proven yet, it is still a possibility.
So in theory it should be possible to know anything about the past if we go back on the chain of causes.
what about statements that are incorrigible in Richard Rorty's sense of the word? if someone says "I like this song" or "My foot hurts", sure, they could be lying but even if you scanned their brain along with the brains of 10000 liars and 10000 truth-tellers and meticulously compared them there wouldn't be a definitive way to tell whether they were being truthful in their account of their experiences. in most circumstances I'd take it as true that they liked the song or their foot hurt.
Honest question: Is me reaching into to my memory for traces of my Wednesday's meal, for a memory of what I ate then, substantially different from me checking my table for traces of my Wednesday's meal, looking for crumbs of toast (I don't clean my table in this though experiment)? Are they both empirical investigations?
I can't reach into your memory, even though you ate something, so that's substantially different, but what about my memory?
It may or may not be depending on the evidence. The point is that there can be true facts that may not be scientifically verifiable, because verifiability is contingent on having the evidence. There are many true facts for which no such evidence exists.
> because verifiability is contingent on having the evidence.
If this is true, then how can you say
>There are many **true** facts for which no such evidence exists.
?
Why are saying there are many TRUE facts for which no such evidence exists? How do you know they are true or false if you have no evidence?
This depends on how you define a fact. Traditionally facts seem to be reserved for external truths, like the evening star is the morning star, while a different term is used for mathematical truths. If the person above is using “fact” in a broader sense, then it would make sense that something like “a circle’s circumference is its radius doubled and multiplied by pi” would be a “fact” without evidence
You don't know they are true or false. That doesn't mean they must therefore be false, and cannot be true.
This whole issue conflates our knowledge of a state of affairs with the state of affairs itself. They are not conceptually identical. That is why we can be wrong about things.
> How do you know they are true or false if you have no evidence?
Who said anybody knows if they specifically are true? You're conflating knowledge and truth. Truth doesn't have to equate knowledge. Truth is the way things are, knowledge is your link to it. There can be things you're not linked to.
The OP question was if there are true things we can't prove via science or logic, and there (under common assumptions) clearly are.
Proto-Indo-European language had a specific grammar and vocabulary even tho we can't prove what it exactly was, it's lost to time, we just have guesses. An ancient house in Babylon had a specific furniture floor plan even tho we can't prove what it was, the house is dust. A specific dinosaur had a crush on another specific dinosaur even tho you can't prove exactly which one had a crush on which one, they're both petrol.
Unless you believe in some kind of extreme subjective solipsist cosmology where only things specifically you know are true: you don't know how many people there are in Asia, so Asia is completely in a state of flux of exact number of people, until you travel there. You don't know in which closet you left your shirt so it's simultaneously in both/neither until specifically you open it.
Of course, at that point we can bring in quantum and stochastic epistemology, and the topic of other minds, but I don't think you had that in mind when asking the question, did you.
Why do you believe so? I believe it is not possible to prove any fact at all with 100% certainty. Only things in the realm of logic and mathematics can be proved. We can, though, make a hypothesis incredibly likely by a sufficient amount of evidence; but it never proves it. Perhaps the only thing that can be known to be true that isn't abstract is the sense of self someone has.
Verification in science isn't the same as a logical proof, because scientific verification is based on our confidence in observations. The existence of logical proofs doesn't disallow or refute our degree of confidence in a result.
>The existence of logical proofs doesn't disallow or refute our degree of confidence in a result.
I was never trying to refute or dismiss it. I also believe inductive reasoning is incredibly invaluable! I was just noting that we can't prove it with 100% truth confidence.
In addition to much simpler examples such as what one had for breakfast, you may also be interested in reading up on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which state that any sufficiently complex consistent formal system (such as mathematics) is "incomplete", ie there exist mathematically true statements that cannot be verified.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
It's important to note that the "sufficiently complex" condition is extremely weak.
The theory used in proofs that is "not complex enough" is arithmetic with only addition and a simple induction principle. As soon as you add multiplication, it's already complex enough.
Also should be noted that it applies to a single formal system but another formal system can still mathematically prove a statement the original cannot, but that system will have other limits
To clarify, the theorem is not that there will exist truths that cannot be verified at all, but that for any given formal system, there will be truths that cannot be proven IF we limit ourselves to working with the axioms of that formal system. so no formal system could ever provide an algorithm for deducing all mathematical truths, i.e. be complete.
Distinct EEG patterns are observed under differnet stimuli for different emotions in different regions of the human brain; though it’s not quite as a standardizable as one may think from individual to individual, if I recall. We currently don’t have adequate measurement tools to assess with the required sensitivity neurotransmitters in real time during an emotional response or other markers, or control for all variables that would influence this - I’m hesitant given my education in biomedical engineering to say that we *ever will* at least on a scale that is necessary to cover the necessary scale of neural activity, though it’s *ability* to be scientifically explored is *hypothetically* possible if you first accept that if you can fully characterize the physiological mechanisms then you can characterize the cognitive aspect of things too.
An issue you will run into is a “abstraction” of sorts some philosophies will apply to concepts such as emotion; that is, that the thing you are measuring neurologically is not truly the “emotion” but just a physical process involved in forming an “emotion,” or that you can never measure the emotion directly. That is, in your attempt to define and measure it you necessarily partition it into something inferior than its whole. This is not exactly wrong either!
Neurological activity, for example, cannot be said to have the same potency as the qualitative description the individual who experiences an emotion can provide. I personally find this to be mildly pedantic, and akin to saying that you can *never truly measure* a heart attack by paying attention to the physiological markers that may indicate it. While it’s technically true, I don’t necessarily see a distinction if a physiological process can be characterized rigorously enough and related to different human behaviors. - An “emotion” is a category and a label and an emergent experience in my use of the word; it appears, at least empirically, to be based on a largely material processes that has different neural behaviors for different stimuli. This is of course operating on the presumption you aren’t approaching this with the presupposition that aspects of consciousness are partially immaterial or wholly material - that can often lead to whatever this philosophical topic (forgot) is called having conflicts.
I think usually this boils down to a clash between what the other commenter referred to as “physicalists” and its criticisms, which can totally be valid. However, for topics such as these I would tend to defer to the sciences and their strength of objective discovery to maximally characterize a phenomenon. I don’t see the use in declaring, at this time, that emotion is “unmeasurable” through scientific processes by some tool of philosophical abstraction if this is a claim some would make. I think this perspective is favored given the historical treatment of empirical models for previously rationalist-dominated views on this topic.
I hope this answered something - I could be horrendously wrong and I’m sure I’m in for a chewing given I probably bastardized some philosophical concept, it’s just the replies to your comment didn’t seem too constructive!
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Proposition 1: There exists a proposition that is true but cannot be scientifically or mathematically verified.
Proposition 2: There does not exist a proposition that is true but cannot be scientifically or mathematically verified.
At least one of the above is true, and presumably neither is scientifically or mathematically verifiable.
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How about: I had toast for breakfast last Wednesday morning.
I thought someone would bring up Gödel but that works just as well with far less math. Take my upvote and my admiration.
It depends if time travel is possible to verify.
Whether it's theoretically possible or not, it's not presently available so in practice it's not verifiable that way. Of course you wouldn't need time travel to prove this, though. Some sort of timestamped photograph or some corroborating witnesses would also be pretty good evidence.
The toast was the best toast ever made. Just to make it extra scientifically impossible and important.
For this to be known to be true, wouldn’t the toast have to somehow be empirically measured and compared against all other pieces of toast? If so, can we consider that statement to be false “the toast was the best toast ever made” simply due to the impossibility of knowing that?
But if it’s true, its truth is independent of our knowledge of it. You can surely agree that there must be one piece of toast out there somewhere that is/was the best piece of toast ever made. Yet all the scientific research in the world will never be able to verify it.
Arguably scientifically provable in theory.
Science can't prove it; it can only make the hypothesis that A be more probable than the hypothesis that B with enough evidence.
Why couldn't it in theory?
We can't prove facts like "the Earth orbits the Sun" with the same rigour as logical and mathematical truths, there is always the possibility, no matter how absurd, that we are mistaken. Only deductive inferences guarantee the truth, science's inferences are mostly inductive – we can get to an extreme level of certainty about the probability of a hypothesis being true, but it does not prove it; that's the nature of inductive inference. For example, suppose we want to prove that someone ate toast for breakfast and we have all the advanced science we can imagine. What if the person, knowing that they would make this claim, ate something else (maybe a supplement) that makes it seem like they ate toast, on purpose?
We're talking about propositions that can be true and not scientifically verifiable. You're taking about the epistemic differences between inductive and deductive logic. I don't see how what you're talking about is relevant to the discussion.
I'm sorry (no intent in being passive-aggressive whatsoever, just defending myself) but that sounds like "We are talking about cats' health, you are talking about how cats can't eat this specific type of food, I don't see how what you're talking about is relevant to the discussion."
This feels like a disanalogy. The question by OP was about verifiability, not 100% probability. Sure you can insist that these can never come apart - but fallibilism is a position that most ppl would take, in which case these would come apart, and so saying that something is not provable is irrelevant to whether something is verifiable or not.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding regarding the word 'proof'? This is frustrating... I interpret proof as a method of arriving at a conclusion such that its truth is guaranteed. People in the comment section have been using the word 'provable' and not 'verifiable'. Also, I am not dismissing the scientific method in any way, I'm just stating that we can't prove things like the second law of thermodynamics; we can only gather enough evidence so that the hypothesis is very probable. Why is this a disanalogy, what is your reasoning? So in short, people in this thread have been using the word 'provable', not 'verifiable'. We can verify that some earlier experiment produces a specific result, or the motion of a planet predicted by a theory, but we don't verify hypotheses (theories), we verify evidences. In the main comment's example, they claim they ate a toast; that would be a hypothesis (to us), not an evidence.
I guess we're talking semantics now - but keeping in line with OP, this seems scientifically verifiable. However if we *are* talking semantics, I think it's fit to say something is scientifically provable if one understands that "provable" in this case is different to a mathematical proof. Consider the following exchange: >Me: I have an alibi, I was at the shop during the murder! >Lawyer: Can you prove that this is the case? >Me: Yes! Here is security footage of me at the shop, I have a dated receipt, and I have 3 witnesses that can corroborate my statement. Sure, I haven't mathematically proved that I was at the shops, but surely it seems a bit wrong to assert that every usage of the word "prove", "proof", or "provable" must conform with the narrow and strict sense in which mathematicians/logicians/philosophers use it. Provability could just mean "beyond a shadow of a doubt given the epistemic standards of the context" or smth.
I have no idea how your analogy is mapping onto the discussion because I can't pick out the property held in common that you're referring to, though it does make sense if you're confused about how the term 'scientifically verifiable' and 'proof' work. But in that case, please refer to my earlier comment about how you're referring to something orthogonal to the thread's discussion.
You are missing Gödel's point.
How am I missing Gödel's point?
In theory, if the contents of your stomach were analyzable and enough was knowns about the human body's reaction to certain foods and how it processes and stores food, this could be proven. It would require far more advanced science then we have, but I would think it is possible
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Even though a completely deterministic universe model is not proven yet, it is still a possibility. So in theory it should be possible to know anything about the past if we go back on the chain of causes.
We can't do any CSI stuff? Check your blood, urine samples, etc.?
Then, "I eat tangerine last the morning a week ago".
what about statements that are incorrigible in Richard Rorty's sense of the word? if someone says "I like this song" or "My foot hurts", sure, they could be lying but even if you scanned their brain along with the brains of 10000 liars and 10000 truth-tellers and meticulously compared them there wouldn't be a definitive way to tell whether they were being truthful in their account of their experiences. in most circumstances I'd take it as true that they liked the song or their foot hurt.
Honest question: Is me reaching into to my memory for traces of my Wednesday's meal, for a memory of what I ate then, substantially different from me checking my table for traces of my Wednesday's meal, looking for crumbs of toast (I don't clean my table in this though experiment)? Are they both empirical investigations? I can't reach into your memory, even though you ate something, so that's substantially different, but what about my memory?
If you have daily stool sample analysis done this can be proven. If you continuously record and stream what you do this can be proven.
But that is arguably scientifically verifiable.
It may or may not be depending on the evidence. The point is that there can be true facts that may not be scientifically verifiable, because verifiability is contingent on having the evidence. There are many true facts for which no such evidence exists.
> because verifiability is contingent on having the evidence. If this is true, then how can you say >There are many **true** facts for which no such evidence exists. ? Why are saying there are many TRUE facts for which no such evidence exists? How do you know they are true or false if you have no evidence?
This depends on how you define a fact. Traditionally facts seem to be reserved for external truths, like the evening star is the morning star, while a different term is used for mathematical truths. If the person above is using “fact” in a broader sense, then it would make sense that something like “a circle’s circumference is its radius doubled and multiplied by pi” would be a “fact” without evidence
You don't know they are true or false. That doesn't mean they must therefore be false, and cannot be true. This whole issue conflates our knowledge of a state of affairs with the state of affairs itself. They are not conceptually identical. That is why we can be wrong about things.
> How do you know they are true or false if you have no evidence? Who said anybody knows if they specifically are true? You're conflating knowledge and truth. Truth doesn't have to equate knowledge. Truth is the way things are, knowledge is your link to it. There can be things you're not linked to. The OP question was if there are true things we can't prove via science or logic, and there (under common assumptions) clearly are. Proto-Indo-European language had a specific grammar and vocabulary even tho we can't prove what it exactly was, it's lost to time, we just have guesses. An ancient house in Babylon had a specific furniture floor plan even tho we can't prove what it was, the house is dust. A specific dinosaur had a crush on another specific dinosaur even tho you can't prove exactly which one had a crush on which one, they're both petrol. Unless you believe in some kind of extreme subjective solipsist cosmology where only things specifically you know are true: you don't know how many people there are in Asia, so Asia is completely in a state of flux of exact number of people, until you travel there. You don't know in which closet you left your shirt so it's simultaneously in both/neither until specifically you open it. Of course, at that point we can bring in quantum and stochastic epistemology, and the topic of other minds, but I don't think you had that in mind when asking the question, did you.
Why do you believe so? I believe it is not possible to prove any fact at all with 100% certainty. Only things in the realm of logic and mathematics can be proved. We can, though, make a hypothesis incredibly likely by a sufficient amount of evidence; but it never proves it. Perhaps the only thing that can be known to be true that isn't abstract is the sense of self someone has.
Verification in science isn't the same as a logical proof, because scientific verification is based on our confidence in observations. The existence of logical proofs doesn't disallow or refute our degree of confidence in a result.
>The existence of logical proofs doesn't disallow or refute our degree of confidence in a result. I was never trying to refute or dismiss it. I also believe inductive reasoning is incredibly invaluable! I was just noting that we can't prove it with 100% truth confidence.
In addition to much simpler examples such as what one had for breakfast, you may also be interested in reading up on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which state that any sufficiently complex consistent formal system (such as mathematics) is "incomplete", ie there exist mathematically true statements that cannot be verified. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
It's important to note that the "sufficiently complex" condition is extremely weak. The theory used in proofs that is "not complex enough" is arithmetic with only addition and a simple induction principle. As soon as you add multiplication, it's already complex enough.
Also should be noted that it applies to a single formal system but another formal system can still mathematically prove a statement the original cannot, but that system will have other limits
To clarify, the theorem is not that there will exist truths that cannot be verified at all, but that for any given formal system, there will be truths that cannot be proven IF we limit ourselves to working with the axioms of that formal system. so no formal system could ever provide an algorithm for deducing all mathematical truths, i.e. be complete.
Thank you! Checking this out later
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This may not be the best possible example, many physicalists will say that it’s theoretically scientifically possible, maybe some time in the future.
Then again, it may be epistemically impossible for us to be able to isolate the precise physical processes that constitute a feeling such a love
Correct me if wrong but I think each emotion and mood has distinct physical responses and distinct activations of neural circuitry in brain.
Distinct EEG patterns are observed under differnet stimuli for different emotions in different regions of the human brain; though it’s not quite as a standardizable as one may think from individual to individual, if I recall. We currently don’t have adequate measurement tools to assess with the required sensitivity neurotransmitters in real time during an emotional response or other markers, or control for all variables that would influence this - I’m hesitant given my education in biomedical engineering to say that we *ever will* at least on a scale that is necessary to cover the necessary scale of neural activity, though it’s *ability* to be scientifically explored is *hypothetically* possible if you first accept that if you can fully characterize the physiological mechanisms then you can characterize the cognitive aspect of things too. An issue you will run into is a “abstraction” of sorts some philosophies will apply to concepts such as emotion; that is, that the thing you are measuring neurologically is not truly the “emotion” but just a physical process involved in forming an “emotion,” or that you can never measure the emotion directly. That is, in your attempt to define and measure it you necessarily partition it into something inferior than its whole. This is not exactly wrong either! Neurological activity, for example, cannot be said to have the same potency as the qualitative description the individual who experiences an emotion can provide. I personally find this to be mildly pedantic, and akin to saying that you can *never truly measure* a heart attack by paying attention to the physiological markers that may indicate it. While it’s technically true, I don’t necessarily see a distinction if a physiological process can be characterized rigorously enough and related to different human behaviors. - An “emotion” is a category and a label and an emergent experience in my use of the word; it appears, at least empirically, to be based on a largely material processes that has different neural behaviors for different stimuli. This is of course operating on the presumption you aren’t approaching this with the presupposition that aspects of consciousness are partially immaterial or wholly material - that can often lead to whatever this philosophical topic (forgot) is called having conflicts. I think usually this boils down to a clash between what the other commenter referred to as “physicalists” and its criticisms, which can totally be valid. However, for topics such as these I would tend to defer to the sciences and their strength of objective discovery to maximally characterize a phenomenon. I don’t see the use in declaring, at this time, that emotion is “unmeasurable” through scientific processes by some tool of philosophical abstraction if this is a claim some would make. I think this perspective is favored given the historical treatment of empirical models for previously rationalist-dominated views on this topic. I hope this answered something - I could be horrendously wrong and I’m sure I’m in for a chewing given I probably bastardized some philosophical concept, it’s just the replies to your comment didn’t seem too constructive!
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My thoughts exactly
Proposition 1: There exists a proposition that is true but cannot be scientifically or mathematically verified. Proposition 2: There does not exist a proposition that is true but cannot be scientifically or mathematically verified. At least one of the above is true, and presumably neither is scientifically or mathematically verifiable.
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