LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Messages
- 21,455
In addition to true unfalsifiability, there is also a significant issue related to the burden of proof when it comes to claims which are unreasonably difficult to falsify. For example, suppose I claim that there is only one place in the whole of the King James English translation of The Bible where the letters "p" "a" and "f" occur one after the other. Now, someone wanting to check this claim could, of course, go through the whole of the King James Bible looking for those three letters in sequence, and check whether they occurred once and only once. In that sense, the claim is falsifiable. But it's unreasonable to make that claim and then to expect anyone questioning/challenging the claim to have to try to falsify it themselves.
And a similar (though obviously less extreme) example, as applied to the Knox/Sollecito trial process, might be a claim that "It came out in the (e.g. Massei) trial that Knox was overheard in a bar, two days before the murder, discussing with Sollecito how much she hated Kercher". If one were to make that claim, then anyone seeking to check or falsify it would have to search through a great proportion of (huge) transcript of the evidence/testimony section of that trial to see whether any witness ever made that statement in the trial. It would be possible to do, but unreasonable.
In both the Bible example and the trial testimony example, any reasonable person would see that the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim - even though the claim technically is falsifiable in both instances.
And a similar (though obviously less extreme) example, as applied to the Knox/Sollecito trial process, might be a claim that "It came out in the (e.g. Massei) trial that Knox was overheard in a bar, two days before the murder, discussing with Sollecito how much she hated Kercher". If one were to make that claim, then anyone seeking to check or falsify it would have to search through a great proportion of (huge) transcript of the evidence/testimony section of that trial to see whether any witness ever made that statement in the trial. It would be possible to do, but unreasonable.
In both the Bible example and the trial testimony example, any reasonable person would see that the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim - even though the claim technically is falsifiable in both instances.