Status Updates From The Logic of Scientific Dis...

Hmm interesting response to Hume. He tries to get out of Hume’s dilemma (“Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion”) by not tying objectivity to establishment or justification, but rather falsifiability. Because trying to use experience to justify truth was already seen as misleading with Hume’s problem of induction.

"The statement 'Here is a glass of water' cannot be verified by any observational experience. The reason is that the *universals* which appear in it cannot be correlated w/ any specific sense-experience. ...By the word 'glass' ...we denote physical bodies which exhibit a certain *law-like behaviour*, and the same holds for the word 'water'. Universals cannot be reduced to classes of experiences; [nor] 'constituted'."

"A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination but does not advance our knowledge." -J. Black (1803)