otokage007
Well-Known Member
lol. Sure. I will try to be more picky with my words next time. I thought everyone had understood me, but it was the other way around.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Negatives could be proved
- Thread starter paarsurrey
- Start date
lol. Sure. I will try to be more picky with my words next time. I thought everyone had understood me, but it was the other way around.
Draka is right about Revoltingest being right about me being right about you being embarrassingly wrong. :yes:
jasonwill2
Well-Known Member
You can prove that pink elephants do not exist in x room, but not in all rooms in the Universe on millions of planets without being everywhere and everytime at once.
Thanks for sharing ...
jasonwill2
Well-Known Member
Thanks for sharing ...
Some people do not realize this, so I felt obligated to say it.
Oh oh, can I share?
My mom use to have a pink elephant on her front lawn. It was plastic, but it was a pink elephant.
This would qualify, as I never said it was alive, meaning pink elephants exist.
ImmortalFlame
Woke gremlin
A negative can be proven if it is a self-contradictory proposition. For example, I can prove that there are no married bachelors.
jasonwill2
Well-Known Member
thats an exception to the rule, however, those kinds of negatives
otokage007
Well-Known Member
Hypothesis 1: Humans have 80 million of red cells on their blood.
Hypothesis 2: Humans don't.
If my results reject the first hypothesis, the second, which is a negative, becomes true. Therefore I'm proving a negative.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
Do they belong to science or they fall in arts?
I agree with this, especially the second paragraph. It reminds me of...
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible." — Carl Friedrich Gauss.
... one of my favorite quotes.
I find myself compelled to agree with this.
No bickering with you tonight, Lady Draka. :sad:
I'm pretty sure they (mathematics and logic) belong to the formal sciences.
Last edited:
Negatives can't be proven.
The above statement is negative.
It can't be proven.
Ergo, the idea that negatives can't be proven can only be an assumption/belief, as it cannot be proved without disproving itself.
Nonsense.
For some freely accessible peer-reviewed rejoinders to the above view of statistics, science, hypothesis testing, and probability, see e.g.,
Mindless Statistics
The ongoing tyranny of statistical significance testing in biomedical research
Null Hypothesis Testing: Problems, Prevalence, and an Alternative
For more in-depth critiques, or alternative views of the role of statistics and probability in the sciences, see e.g.,
Making Social Sciences More Scientific: The Need for Predictive Models by Rein Taagepera (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes (published posthumously and edited by G. L. Bretthorst). (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Probabilities, Laws and Strutures. Volume III of The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective. Edited by Dieks, Gonzalez, Hartmann, Stöltzner, & Weber (Springer, 2012).
Probability and Social Science: Methodological Relationships between the two Approaches by Daniel Courgeau. Volume 10 of Method Series (Springer, 2012).
Given the limited response, and your tendency to (usually brilliantly) use dry, witty sarcasm, I can't tell if this is a joke or you misunderstood me. I think the latter is more likely, as I should have put the opening statement in quotations or presented it formally (e.g., "let P represent the proposition that...").
The point is that the assertion "negatives can't be proven" is itself a negative:
Let Px represent "x can be proven" and let "Nx" represent "is a negative" (or any assertion, proposition, etc., which is formulated as a negative). Then the statement "negatives can't be proven" is equivalent to
~∃x(Nx -->Px) or "There exists no x s.t. if x is a negative, then x can be proven".
or
∀x(Nx-->~Px) or "For all/any x, if x is a negative, then x cannot be proven"
Under the assumption that these statements (all equivalent) are true, then it must be the case that no negative statement, assertion, proposition, or similar truth-bearing symbolism can be proven. However, the assumed premise is itself a negative statement, and therefore under the assumption that it is true, it cannot be proven, for any proof that it is true would constitute a contradiction.
Rather than "nonsense" would you have prefered "thoughtless category error"?
No, that would still result in the same problem (a claim which could be correct and I might even agree with, but cannot evaluate because you aren't providing me with enough information). There are many ways in which one can assert that negatives cannot be proven and hold that this assertion can be proven at the same time (for example, by restricting the universe/domain to "negatives about physical things"). But it is nonetheless true that the statement "negatives cannot be proven" is logically equivalent to the negation of an assertion
and therefore under the assumption that it is true it must be that it cannot be proven true.
This is purely a matter of logic, and I'm not making any ontological or epistemological claims, particularly as "proof" when it comes to the "real world", at least as far as most philosophers of science are concerned, is impossible.
As others have at least touched on already in this thread, the words "proof" or "prove" tend to be thrown around rather freely in regular discourse even when discussing science. I think this is because too often the extent to which intuitive conceptions of these terms are adequate is not considered. Using logic to analyze statements certainly has limits (as even logic is subject to interpretation), but it is a useful place to begin IMO. Especially when we are talking about "proof"
Last edited:
otokage007
Well-Known Member
Can you not prove a negative?
In most logical systems (including classical propositional and predicate calculi) you can. This includes extentions to and replacements of classical formal logic (e.g., fuzzy logic, modal logic, etc.). However, as far as science is concerned, both in practice and in most philosophical accounts, nothing is "proved". While mathematics journals frequently use terms like "proof", "proved", "proven", etc., the sciences do not (unless we are talking about mathematical formalism or quantitative developments within a science, such as statistical techniques or optimization algorithms). And books on the scientific method, both those designed for education and those intended to advance the philosophy of science, almost invariabley do not use such terms either.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
They try to match it with what is understood to be in existence in nature.