User talk:StudentOfLif

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Happy editing! Jay8g [V•T•E] 05:17, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks for taking the time, I am happy to be here. StudentOfLif (talk) 13:22, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Blackjack, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A bare URL error. References show this error when one of the URL-containing parameters cannot be paired with an associated title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 04:56, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

What you wrote is not specific enough to make a definitive judgment about your intentions. I agree that the second paragraph could be simplified and should focus on the contrast with verifiability, but I am very concerned with your sentence "The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs do not provide a concise and intuitive consensus statement that I believe would be most beneficial to readers." Wikipedia is not about finding a concensus in sources. It's the opposite that must be the objective, especially in the case of falsifiability. The sources offer different perspectives about what is Popper's definition of falsifiability. The article must reflect that. The third, fourth and fifth paragraphs are actually doing an excellent job in that regard. But, again, it is hard to tell what you have in mind. Maybe you are aware of a concensus that is available in very good sources and you consider that Lakatos misunderstanding is too old to be mentioned.

I looked for sources to see if the situation progressed since a few years ago. My research brought me to Is Falsifiability a ‘Blunt Instrument’ for Modern Physics?. Here is how it defines falsifiability:

Given that a statement (a theory or a conjecture) has the status of belonging to the empirical sciences if and only if it is falsifiable, the next question would be: when is a theory or conjecture falsifiable? Few scientists engaged in the current debates appear to be heedfully aware of the fact that falsifiability in the sense of Popper’s demarcation criterion is a purely logical affair. It deals only with the logical structure of statements or of classes of statements and has nothing to do with the question of whether or not certain possible experimental results would be accepted as falsifications. A statement or theory is, according to Popper’s (1983) criterion, falsifiable if and only if there exists at least one potential falsifier, i.e., at least one possible basic statement that conflicts with it logically.

If all the sources were as clear as this one about falsifiability, the article Falsifiability would be much easier to write. Unfortunately, as mentioned in this source, many scientists are not aware of that definition. In fact, even many philosophers seem to ignore it. They will insist on the contrast with verifiability, as if this alone was enough to capture the essential idea of falsifiability. But, it is only a starting point. It does not capture the essential of falsifiability.

In fact, viewing this contrast as the very essence of falsifiability is responsible for most of the confusion on the subject. Because of this confusion, some philosophers argue that falsifiability is as problematic as verifiability because the experiments used for falsifications can be flawed. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of the practical value of the purely logical definition, which is based on the fact that science is largely a creative process leading to conjectures followed by a purely deductive logical process. The part where we conduct the experiments can hardly be rigorous, and that is not the interesting aspect of science. Even the work of highly experimental physicists relies heavily on theoretical modeling and logical deductions. Thus, the fact that falsifiability is a purely logical matter is very practical and corresponds to real science.

Of course, Popper was aware that we must do actual experiments and that the direction taken by science will depend on the results of these experiments, but he considered this as the methodological side of science. He said that the methodological side can hardly be made rigorous, contrasted it with the logical side and insisted that falsifiability is only for the logical side. Dominic Mayers (talk) 00:43, 28 May 2025 (UTC)

Hello, StudentOfLif, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:58, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Ian! I am very excited for this project! StudentOfLif (talk) 00:37, 18 January 2026 (UTC)