Why does the government hide UFO's?

No.

An "IOW" is a rationalization. The words you got weren't aligned with what you thought, so you have substituted your own "other" words so it sounds better to you. You can live with it in your terms.

But whatever you gotta say to feel better about it.
You don't need my blessing.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

If you're attributing pseudoscience to the behavior of supporters of unfalsifiable theories, that'd be a behavioral issue and one based more of your own moral judgment rather than on any reputed methodology. Just so you know...

So if I say I love my sister, and that it is a fact, and that doubters of this fact are idiots, does that make me a psuedoscientist?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

What does moral judgment have to do with it?

We've had reams and reams of posts in threads on pseudo-scientific topics wherein the posters employ horribly sloppy logic, dressing up poorly-documented anecdotes as if they were data and drawing conclusions from sketchy evidence that far overreach that which is warranted*. * based on sound science principles such as requiring a preponderance of evidence and exploring alternatives before drawing conclusions, just to name one of myriad.

That's not how one does critical thinking, let alone science. It's fallacious logic, it's naive, it's undereducated and it's without a hint of acknowledgement that education in critical thinking is ... well ... critical to analysis. The logical flaws are egregious and blatantly obvious. Far from moral judgment; it's a judgment of logic.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

So pseudoscience isn't just an unfalsifiable claim then. It' s all this other crap you allege is going in other threads having nothing whatsoever to do with this discussion. Does THAT mean all these other claims are bullshit then? Oh wait, but you said pseudoscience isn't bullshit. It's uncritical thinking that is bullshit. So who defines critical thinking ? You? Science? Popper? Who? Give me a scientific definition of critical thinking so we can be on the same page here.

 

I like this definition of critical thinking. They actually formed a national council to decide what it is!

"The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking[2] defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."====https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

 

I strongly disagree. If it's true that if you are indeed six feet tall, then no accurate measurement will disagree. But the possibility of those measurements disagreeing remains. That's what falsifiability is concerned with.

Imagine me hypothesizing that 'God is omnipotent' and can do anything. So any state of affairs would seemingly be consistent with the existence of an omnipotent God. No possible state of affairs and no possible observation would be inconsistent with the hypothesis. That's what it means to be 'unfalsifiable'. In the example of measuring your height at six feet, there are all kinds of possible observations that would be inconsistent with you being that height, even if none of them are observed in actual fact. We still know what it would mean for you to be measured at something other than six feet and what kind of observation it would take to show that.

The possibility of detecting if you weren't six feet tall is what falsifiability is concerned with. 'Falsifiable' is not synonymous with 'false' such that truth excludes it. It means not only could have been false (which introduces probabilistic considerations since now we are talking about possibilities) but also that there is some way of detecting if it is false.

I think that you made an excellent point that rocked your opponents back on their heels. But it's important to notice that not all existential claims are the same.

There's a big logical difference between saying 'This particular observation was an observation of a neutrino' and the more airy and open-ended 'neutrinos exist'. They look very different when we try to falsify them. We can assign a constant to a particular observation (call it a) and say 'aN' (where N means 'is a neutrino'). Falsifying it gives us (~aN). No problem.

Falsifying 'Neutrinos exist' produces 'neutrinos don't exist'. In predicate logic that's a universal statement 'For all x, ~xN' (where 'xN' means 'x is a neutrino'). That lands us in precisely the problem that Popper was originally trying to extract us from, the problem of induction. We can examine x's, one after another (nope, not a neutrino) and never be sure that the next x we examine won't be the neutrino that we are looking for. Popper himself recognized this difficulty.

But saying 'this particular observation was an observation of a neutrino' doesn't fall prey to that particular difficulty. We are just applying some defining standard for neutrinos (which will probably be some universally quantified 'for all x' theoretical statement that itself falls prey to the problem hat induction creates for the positivists' verification principle) and are determining whether the observation in question meets that standard. If it does, we are justified in saying that what we just observed was a neutrino (according to that standard). And once we have an example of a neutrino being observed, then the universal statement 'neutrinos exist' has been verified as well, since all it takes for it to be true is one neutrino.

Popper was arguing against the positivists' verification principle that insisted that in order to be scientific (or even meaningful in the more extreme versions) a statement had to be empirically verifiable. He proposed his 'falsifiability criterion' because the problem of induction renders verification of universal statements from individual confirming instances problematic. What he was thinking about were the general principles of physics, its so-called 'laws'. His observation was that falsifying universal statements with individual disconfirming instances doesn't encounter the difficulty that verifying them does. No amount of positive verification will ever logically prove a universal law true, but only one disconfirming observation can prove it false.

Confirming individual observations doesn't fall prey to the problem of induction (assuming the truth of the theoretical principles, which is itself problematic as we've just seen) since it merely consists of determining whether an observation conforms to a larger defining class. If it does, then just a single observation of x will serve to logically verify 'x's exist'.

So I'd say that falsification isn't a "scientific method" shibboleth. It isn't satisfactory, in and of itself, to be a demarcation criterion between 'science' and 'pseudoscience'. It probably needs to be understood in conjunction with verification. If a statement is subject to empirical verification, then we should recognize that statement as scientific (or potentially scientific) even if it isn't falsifiable. ('Neutrinos exist' might arguably be an example of that. All it takes to verify it is observing a single neutrino.)

My belief is that all of this stuff is more complicated and subtle than the simplistic "scientific method" version that kids get in high school would lead them to believe.

 

you guys are figthing about this little stuff all i see is bunch of kids fighting about which toy is better

 

You look at toys; leave the methodology of science to us.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

kkk u can have your worthless commonsense methodology all i see is bunch of idiots trying to prove shit

 

I'd ask what, then, you're doing on a science forum, but I see that this is actually in the woo forum, so yours is not an entirely unexpected attitude.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I would point out that criticizing something from the outside without contributing to it is a form of trolling.

Why not contribute meaningfully?

 

The government hides the reality of UFO's because it can ; because it knows how ; after 71 yrs. and because it has gained huge amount of tech. Through reverse engineering.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Flying Saucer technology!

 

the thing is I suppose is that , when many can not handle the truth of UFO'S and the like . They shut down their intellect.

This has happened thousands of times , through the last 65 plus yrs.

 

Wow. I guess you're older than 65, and your intellect has shut down that often.

What a burden.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Yup.
In his previous post he thought he was 71.

 

I do that when my blood pressure stays up...

 

oh you people . just can not handle the truth .

oh ...well the truth does not disappear because you ignore its veracity .

 

I think that one of the strongest arguments against the idea that the world's governments believe that ufos are extraterrestrial spacecraft is those governments' behavior regarding ufos. If Washington or Canberra believed that ufos are really space-aliens, they would be aggressively investigating every ufo report. Scientists and military men would descend on everyone who reports a ufo and especially the 'contactees'. We would expect to see worldwide networks of instruments constantly observing the heavens and vast sums of money being directed into SETI. We would probably see more international cooperation between Earth governments in the face of a perceived extraterrestrial threat.

In real life we don't see anything like that. The response to ufos is a huge yawn. Governments are still focused on their Earthly rivalries and engrossed in their own inane domestic politics.

If the US government had crashed saucers tucked away at 'Area 51' and had succeeded in reverse engineering them, wouldn't there be some evidence of that alien technology being put to use? Where are the anti-gravity, the inertial damping fields and the faster than light drives? Human space travel hasn't really made any significant advances at all since the end of the 1960's.