(This is one of those posts that inexplicably disappear into the ether when posted. I have reconstructed it as best as I remember in the short time remaining. I hope it still makes sense)
If a thing exists, but no evidence has yet been presented to our notice about this thing (quantum fluctuations a few hundred years ago, for example), then how do we know about this thing? We have no reason to consider it as existing.
But yet it does, and we would have been wrong to dismiss the possibility that "things can come out of nowhere and disappear without trace". We would have been wrong to say absolutely that "there is no X". I take your point about the difference between the general and the particular, but that general statement was just as true when it was dismissed as absurd nonsense.
Think about the 200+ traditional Chinese medicines which may have been used for the treatment of malaria. When subject to a scientific evaluation, one of them was effective against malaria and the rest were not. Yet that one was not distinguished from the others, and could have easily escaped inclusion. The tool of informal, uncontrolled observation is useless for letting us know whether something exists, from both directions. Not only does it fail to recognize the non-existence of the thing, but it fails to discover existence when it is present. It discovers things that don't exist and it fails to discover things that do exist.
I take your point (to an extent). But, isn't it sometimes true that "informal uncontrolled observation" is how the whole process gets started. If the observation doesn't hold up under controlled conditions, we move on.
Our certainty doesn't stem from the specifics of one particular test, rather our certainty stems from the history of science whereby we have discovered the conditions under which we are going to be wrong. What this challenge showed us is that Connie's claims were formed under those conditions.
Okay, I'm getting an understanding of what you're saying and its hard to fault. But it's just the total certainty of "there is no X" that bothers me. How confident we can be about what we know.
By saying that that isn't good enough, that we need to prove each of her claims to be wrong under all conditions in order to say that the thing doesn't exist, is to suggest that we change our approach. Rather than forming ideas on the basis of careful observation and evidence, we form ideas in their absence and then use careful observation and evidence to exclude those which are false.
You are talking about how science moves forward and makes progress as opposed to how it stagnates. And I agree. I am absolutely appalled at the waste in human time and effort that has been expended on homoeopathy for example. So, I'm not suggesting we do that. I'm happy to leave those ideas that have no plausibility. But I'm happy to just
leave those ideas. I'm not obsessed about pronouncing them
dead. There's no plausibility, there's no evidence, so let's just move on.
Where do you get the idea that this hypothesis cannot be proven? Any hypothesis can be designated the null or the non-null.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I thought the idea was to frame what you believe to be the case as the null hypothesis. In Connie's case, because of the present lack of plausibility and evidence about paranormal abilities, we believe that "Connie does not have paranormal abilities". That is, therefore, the null hypothesis. And the null hypothesis is what we try to prove wrong (I mean if we think it worth our while to bother).
But in this case, I think the null hypothesis is really "Connie's claims are based on the usual methods that lead to false claims".
Maybe, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference.
Do you think that she came by those claims through careful, controlled testing, then?
No. That's what the test was designed to do.
BillyJoe
