This is something so fundamental that it must be taught in schools, yet was only voiced in 1934 (and had to wait until 1959 for the English translation). It originated from the philosopher Karl Popper, one of the few philosophers ever to make any sort of a contribution to science. Unfortunately, the politicians who define the syllabus don’t want it taught.
What it is
Falsifiability is the capacity for a statement to be proven false. It doesn’t mean that it has been shown to be false, only that one could think of something, an experiment or an event that might show it to be so. The only worthwhile statements are those which can be proved wrong in many different ways and yet have not been. The more different ways in which a statement can be shown to be wrong but have not, the more powerful the statement.
For example, consider these two statements:
A: Information cannot travel faster than light in a vacuum.
B: This country needs a strong leader.
Only the first can be shown to be false, even though we currently believe it to be true. It is hugely falsifiable – any number of experiments can (and have been) done to find something faster than light. The fact that nothing can travel faster than light leads to the theories of special and general relativity with its slowing clocks, light being deflected by gravity, E = mc², magnetic fields and why gold is such a nice colour. So far, nothing has been found that can transmit information faster than the speed of light; in 2011 a group in Italy thought that they’d found neutrinos travelling about 25 parts per million faster than light, but after a lot of fuss it turned out to be instrumentation error. (I’m neglecting a lot of quantum weirdness here.)
“This country needs a strong leader”, on the other hand cannot be disproved because it cannot be tested. Its terms are ill-defined; what is meant by “needs”, “strong” and indeed “this country”? “Strong” tends to mean “agrees with me and is forceful”; strong and doesn’t agree with me is usually a “fascist”. Even if we could find someone who, by popular consent is “strong” and put them in power, we’d have to agree on whether or not they were what the country needed. If they were not successful, then the proponent of the assertion could turn it around and say “well that just shows insufficient strength”, adding a sort of circularity present in many such unfalsifiable statements. Or alternatively he can still argue that the country needs a strong leader, just not that one, perhaps one having a different kind of strength; it is impossible to tie down.
Origin
Popper’s thoughts about this originated with the comparison between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis.
The main difference between them, as Popper saw it, was that while Einstein’s theory was highly “risky”, in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in the light of the then dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies—confirmed by Eddington’s experiments in 1919), and which would, if they turned out to be false, falsify the whole theory, nothing could, even in principle, falsify psychoanalytic theories. They were, Popper argues, “simply non-testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behaviour which could contradict them” … What is apparently the chief source of strength of psychoanalysis, he concluded, viz. its capability to accommodate and explain every possible form of human behaviour, is in fact a critical weakness, for it entails that it is not, and could not be, genuinely predictive.[1]
Uses of unfalsifiable statements
Unfalsifiable statements have their uses, usually for manipulating, particularly uniting, people. “God bless America” is a good example. It is a rallying cry, everyone can shout the same thing, each understanding their particular version of each of the three words, particularly ‘America’.
I live in England which is not a big country unlike America which is huge and empty – “miles and miles of bugger all.” [2]. I first travelled across America in 1980 using Greyhound buses; I vividly remember riding in a bus having travelled across Montana for half of eternity (actually rather over 11 hours) and looking forwards to the next stop which was only about 20 minutes away. The bus’s speakers came to life and the driver told us that we’d just crossed a time zone and would we put our watches (and the next stop) back an hour; I think we’d just entered Idaho. In such a place with such a low population density, everyone needs to fence themselves off from the outside world which otherwise is just too big. The effect is real, I think you have to experience it to appreciate it. A woman on that bus explained why her hometown was the only safe place in America, even though she had God Bless America on her bag. Obviously not New York or Los Angeles because of the drugs, not this place nor that, and finally not her local Big City (I forget where) because she once saw some youths in the bus station and didn’t trust them. She was quite serious. It’s easy to scoff, but you’d understand if you spent a week of your life travelling west in a bus. I think this was the first time that I realised how one’s most central and profound thoughts and beliefs could be influenced by such an apparently trivial thing as the geography into which you are born. Anyway, given lots of isolated communities like this, how do you unite them? You need a phrase like “God bless America” and everyone can say the same thing although meaning possibly quite different things which is fine provided that such different interpretations are far enough apart. Of course the internet and wasy travel have brought us all closer and so such phrases don’t work so well if at all.
“God is great” is another good one. It’s an assertion with which it is difficult to disagree, I cannot imagine a god who is not particularly great; the phrase allows a crowd to connect with each other on an emotional, herd-like level. As an atheist the problem I have is ‘is’.
To ask, ‘Is God?’ appears to presuppose a being who perhaps isn’t … and thus is open to the same objection as the question, ‘Does God exist?’… but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel-drive but not, as it happens, existence.
Tom Stoppard – Jumpers
Dualism
A common unfalsifiable construct is dualism, assigning everything to one cause or another and then claiming that you have explained it. God and the devil is the classic; all good things come from god and all bad things from the devil. Things which are pretty good but with drawbacks? Well, that’s a gift from god that has been spoiled by the devil. It’s not explaining anything, just labelling them and certainly proves the existence of neither the devil nor his previous employer. By reducing everything to a single scale between good and bad, from sliced bread to Adolf Hitler, we can apparently explain away so many things without having to worry about the unmanageable complexity that lies behind. Indeed, so much are we built to categorise everything, we usually dispense with the intermediate points and ask, as mediaeval monks were supposed to do, whether or not we worshipped god or the devil. Interestingly I just came across a post which asserted that all atheists worship the devil. Honest to god, we don’t.
Unfalsifiable assertions abound, especially in religion where they are also made more appealing by apparent contradictions. God is three and God is one is a prime example; it’s an obvious falsehood, but for reasons that escape me, curiosity tempts one to ask “what do you mean?”, and in so asking, one suspends one’s disbelief to try to understand it and thus become more receptive to the rubbish that follows. Religion tends to be big on mystery for this very reason. Zen Buddhism with its sound of one hand clapping is at least honest in saying that it’s nonsense and just there to get into the right frame of mind but in Christianity, God moves in a mysterious way if only to avoid falsifiability.
Religion, politics and advertising
So this is my first objection to god, or at least the Abrahamic version, it’s not falsifiable. Why is there so much suffering in the world? Is it god’s will? No, it’s man’s fault for eating an apple, original sin or whatever. I’m sorry, and I know that this is not the most intellectually rigorous argument, but I cannot help but feel it’s just fabricated bollocks. Someone close to me lost her fiancé in a car accident and a Christian colleague told her, straight out, that it was because he had sinned. Well, I’m now three times his age and have had time to commit a lot more sins that he, yet here I sit and typing an essay on why I’m an atheist – surely one of the greater sins. It’s not fair and as devastating as that was to her it is but a small example of the lack of justice in the world. I started to doubt my Christian faith when a school friend lost her sister to an illness, despite her absolute conviction that god was looking after her. The proponents of religion have to deliberately avoid making any positive predictions simply because they would fail.
Politics, the other side of the coin from religion, has its own version of course. In Thatcher’s time we had a lot of “we want the best possible service for the least possible cost”. How could you ever show that you’d achieved that? Are we asking for a discount from Rolls-Royce or the very best rust bucket that a couple of hundred quid will buy? Labour’s website currently reads “It is our chance to take on the challenges of the post-crisis world and grasp the opportunities of the future. To build a future that everyone in Britain can be proud of.” The Tories are worse with “Build Back Better”, the Greens actually rather better. None of these statements can be tested retrospectively and with good reason: in 1997 John Prescott, then secretary of state for transport said “I will have failed if in five years time there are not…far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.” By June 2002, car traffic was up by 7%. Of course by then he wasn’t transport secretary. Either he won’t make that mistake again, or he knew how long are the memories of newspapers.
Advertising used to be a rich area for unfalsifiable claims. “What your friends will never tell you” (that you do not smell very fresh) used to be an advert for, I think, soap. But the law has got tighter; now I’m told that a hair dye covers up to 100% of grey hairs; you can’t easily argue with that, although it is actually unfalsifiable.
The scientific method – theories, proofs and facts
Moving on, let us consider the nature of scientific theories, laws and proofs. Forgive me if all this is obvious from the above, but a scientific ‘law’ is a theory that has not yet been proven wrong. Theories start off as rather weak hypotheses, but if they don’t fall at the first hurdle, they gain strength as more evidence is gathered supporting it and more ways emerge in which they could have been disproved but have not, so the theory grows stronger. Eventually they will get called laws and attract more scepticism if you claim a disproof[3]. Scientific laws do not have to be obeyed, it’s just that there’s a lot of evidence which if it were found would prove them wrong, but so far none has. This is qualitatively different from a law in the legal sense which says don’t do this or else, or any sort of religious or manmade edict.
The conservation of energy did come under serious attack about 100 years ago when certain nuclear reactions (beta decay) were seen to lose energy. Someone invented a lovely model of a star which kept burning for ever because of this lack of energy conservation, but it turned out that the missing energy was taken away by a hitherto unknown and undetected particle, the neutrino, and the conservation of energy remained unscathed. And theories change. The strong ones tend to get modified in some situations, the weaker ones are sometimes disproved. When Einstein put forwards special relativity, it showed that Newton’s laws were still mostly valid but started to go wrong close to the speed of light and that the conservation of energy had to include the energy inherent in the rest mass of an object. But, unless you are into high energy physics you are unlikely to notice[4]. Newton’s law of gravitation suffered a similar fate with general relativity.
The old fashioned view of science of testing a hypothesis by experiment is fine as a starting point, but it’s only part of the picture. There is no scientific proof of anything, just mounting evidence to support a theory. Philosophers agonised over the validity of inductive proof (claiming that something was true based only on current evidence), but this isn’t quite how science works. At any one time there are:
- things that are agreed upon because there is lots of evidence to support them and nothing significant against. This does rely on inductive proof, and always it works, well, usually
- things which are trying to be sorted out with various conflicting theories, and mostly
- things that are known to be unknown.
Scientists live in a world of not knowing things for certain; I loved it when I was one, it’s like having an infinite toy box. As time goes on, the things which are trying to be sorted out get more and more restricted in scope and every now and again there’s a genuine revolution. The beginning of the 20th century was the biggest – confirmation of the existence of atoms and molecules[5], special and general theories of relativity AND quantum mechanics all inside a couple of decades or so, but there have been others such as the Copernican revolution, the enlightenment and theory of evolution. I think we might be heading into another such revolution in astrophysics; within my lifetime we’ve realised that there is around four times as much matter that we cannot see or detect other than through its gravitational effects, and another four times more dark energy, or something that’s making the expansion of the universe accelerate.
“Evolution is just a theory, whereas God’s creation is The Truth” is an example of perhaps an intentional misunderstanding of all of this. There’s no disproof of evolution (that I’m aware of, that stands up to rigorous scrutiny) and lots of evidence to support it but yes, it’s “just” a theory. God’s creation of the world is of course completely unfalsifiable and permits lazy thinking. “This is so complicated that God must have created it” said one young woman sitting next to me as we both looked at a spectacular rock formation.
What it isn’t
Mathematics is fundamentally different from science. Science has theories which are falsifiable and as such, connect to reality. Mathematics starts with axioms, which are defined as being true, then builds from that. A mathematical theorem is only disprovable by showing that it contradicts at least one of its axioms. Science uses mathematics when it suits, probably the most famous case showing this is Euclidean space. Euclid had four postulates that are sort of obvious, and the fifth which always felt rather contrived. There were a lot of attempts to show the fifth came from the first four, but they all failed. Then a couple of Russians found that you could invent “non-Euclidean geometries” which had triangles with angles that didn’t add up to 180° and all sorts of stuff that was just wrong. Later, it turned out that one such geometry (Riemannian) was needed when you were near a mass in space. It’s no more profound than picking up the correctly sized screwdriver.
On the upside, you can actually prove something in mathematics in a way that you cannot with science.
In a rather separate category are trans-scientific questions which sound scientific but are not. They are questions, not statements, but still fall into many of the traps of non-falsifiable statements. “Should we go to the moon again” would be one – how is one to judge? There’s no way that you can show either path to be wrong because the criteria of ‘should’ are not defined. For that matter, who are ‘we’? These are important questions which are highly context dependent (a thing that seems to get forgotten a lot), and discussion is made more difficult by the many different understandings of the original question.
Problems
As with everything else, falsifiability has its own issues. You need to have an agreed criterion of disproof. Any real experiment is going to rely on a lot of theories, so which one did a falsification actually show to be false? All these things are philosophers with too much time on their hands to debate. The central idea of a statement being valueless if it is impossible to think of a way of showing it to be false is an important one.
Conclusion
Unfalsifiable statements are with us to stay but you need to recognise them for what they are; teach all this in schools! I pick as a random example today’s sound bite from the leader of the opposition, “the Prime Minister … puts families last”. Politics is just show business for ugly people.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
[2] Robert Nye, Falstaff, although he was describing north Norfolk
[3] The one exception is the second law of thermodynamics because we can calculate the chance that it’s wrong: astronomically unlikely is too small and pathetic a description.
[4] Although it is responsible for gold being the colour that it is. And the whole of electromagnetism.
[5] It absolutely buggers my mind that the physics establishment didn’t fully accept this until around 1910. I’d have thought that the existence of crystals would be evidence enough.