German court ruling rejects logic, scientific method

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/cour ... s-a-virus/

It's entirely possible that the concept of "proof" was first injected into this issue when it was translated into English. I only understand German at about the level of a six-year-old native speaker (although I've been told by several native speakers that my accent is quite good for an American) so I wouldn't know; I'll proceed on the assumption that the concept of "proof" appears in the original, and that this article results from competent translation.

- Some Guy offers money to anyone who can prove that measles is caused by a virus.
- Some Other Guy offers studies indicating that this is the case.
- German Court rules that Some Guy must pay Some Other Guy.

Science does not - cannot - prove anything. Science disproves a hypothesis, or it doesn't; a hypothesis which remains non-disproven upon repeated experimentation isn't proven, it's inductively strong.

I don't know what role precedent plays in the German judicial system, so this ruling might not affect anything other than this one case. But in a legal system like the US, a ruling like this would create a logical mapping from the concept "inductively strong" to the concept "definitively true". It's not difficult to see how this could result in legal barriers to scientific paradigm shifts being erected.

I'm fairly confident that Some Guy here is barking up the wrong tree with his notion that measles is a psychosomatic illness caused by traumatic separations. If it weren't for the matter of ethics, it would be simple to experimentally disprove this traumatic separation hypothesis by giving some secure, well-attached kids the measles.

The fact is, having nutters purport oddball theories like this is one of the costs of having moral scruples. And it seems to me like Some Guy is now footing the bill for Germany to have its cake and eat it too.

Huh? Science *can* prove something to be the case. Or are you going to insist gravity is "just a theory" and jump off the top of a building?

If X consistently leads to Y, and in the absence of X Y does not occur, with all other things being equal, then there is proof (with a certainty of 1 - epsilon, where epsilon is the very small number representing the chance that the cases have all been due to random chance) that X indeed causes Y.

In the case of measles, the virus itself has been identified; we know that X is a virus. Denying that is tantamount to denying that sunlight comes from the sun - if someone did that and a court ruled against them, would you seriously consider that a rejection of logic and science?

I'm with the German court on this one. I think it's a reasonable ruling.

When SG offered money to anybody who could prove X, he was accepting that X could be proven. It doesn't get to turn into a trick question where SG will always win because proof is inherently impossible.

In any case.....
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/teaching/misconceptions.php#b11

The reason you cannot prove or disprove anything in science is because science is ultimately based on inductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning, there is always the possibility of something coming about that can cause a change in the perceived likelihood of something happening.

For example, referring to gravity, we cannot 100% rule out the possibility that one day things will fall upwards rather than downwards. Of course, with our knowledge, we know that it is highly unlikely.

Also, it isn't just theories that can be shown to be less accurate than we originally believed, but laws can, too.

For example, Newton's laws of mechanics have been shown to not be as accurate as originally believed; it still works well on human-scale applications, but we've found on atomic scale and cosmological scale applications Newton's laws are not very accurate at all. This is something we began to find out about by the 19th century. It would not be fixed until the 20th century, however, with the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which helped fill in the gaps left by Newton's laws.

Fair enough, I spoke too broadly. Science proves that observations are consistent with some model of reality. Science has not generated a model of reality which is isomorphic to reality. I do not believe that such a model is mathematically possible. I may be wrong. It's sufficient that, to date, no such model exists. Thus science cannot prove anything about reality; though of course it's unnecessary for a scientific model to be isomorphic to reality in order for it to be useful.



I'm satisfied that the degree of correspondence between scientific models of gravity and reality is sufficient to warrant not doing so. I don't need to make a proclamation of faith - which is what any statement invoking the concept of proof is, faith in the logical system by which said proof was derived - to come to that conclusion.

The degree of correspondence required between two domains being compared is a function of the circumstances requiring said evaluation. Invoking the concept of "proof" results in a circumstance whereby the correspondence required is perfect. It's not a knock against science to say that the concept of proof has no place within its realm, and it only took me a quick Google search to confirm my suspicion that actual scientists really do wish that people would stop talking about "proof" in relation to science.



No disagreement here.



Specifically we have a posteriori knowledge that X is a virus. The concept of proof does not map to the domain of a posteriori knowledge.



It depends entirely upon whether or not the concept of proof was invoked.

The first symptom of measles is fever. He could split hairs and argue that what we know as "measles" is a collection of symptoms (e.g. fever) that are caused not from the virus, but from the body's reaction to the virus.

And that explains why immunized people don't get measles when infected with it, because what causes measles is the body's reaction to it.

The fact that scientific proof is inherently impossible does not imply that any proof is impossible. It's possible that some guru-type could come unto SG and impart upon him some mystical revelation that unlocks for SG the secret to everything, and in so doing prove to SG that measles is caused by a virus, and that SG would then pay up to said guru. So I disagree that pointing out that "scientific proof" is a contradiction results in the original question being a trick, although it admittedly raises the bar on the difficulty of the task in question.



In any case, I'm looking at a copy of Popper's Conjectures and Refutations sitting on my bookshelf; although I fall on the other end of positivismusstreit myself.

Would it be more correct to say that the German court rejected the sole RELIANCE on logic, rather than the efficacy of logic itself?

Possibly. I was constrained by the subject character limit.

That's hardly an excuse though. It seems to me equivalent to saying "It's too hard to figure out the logical way to do this. Let's just do what feels right instead." Poor widdle judge, thinking too much hurts um's brain.

It's like saying "That's the exception that proves the rule." No, that's the exception that proved whomever formulated the rule was an ignoramus for not including a provision to handle the condition that resulted in the exception.

"Proof", and"truth" mean certain things to scientists, and the two words mean slightly different things to lawyers. They speak in different languages.

In fact lawyers involved in civil law dont speak quite the same language as do lawyers in criminal law.

You may as well stop using the word proof, because you can't actually prove anything. It may well be that you're nothing more than a brain in a vat, in what you think is a very detailed simulation. From within the simulation, you can't prove you're not within it.

Note the near-parity of the Euro-Dollar

Except that's not the case at all. Regardless of whether or not I'm a brain in a vat, given a sufficient set of axioms I can still prove the Pythagorean Theorem.

People who are not mathematicians and/or logicians may as well stop using the word proof, but that condition doesn't apply to me.

What is science without having some of it result in practical outcomes?
Science is used to achieve financial outcomes too.
Without science we wouldn't even have commerce.

Even purists have to live in the real world.

I don't see this as a practical outcome, I see it as bending the rules in order to punish dissent.

In the real world, it's against German law to deny that the Holocaust occurred. Interestingly enough, the possibility that the Holocaust never occurred follows from the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis Magneto brought up.

The law is a ass.