RETURN TO THOUGHTS

Truth and Unfalsifiability

 (A) "All unfalsifiable claims are true"

(A) is false and unfalsifiable. It is false because there are probably false unfalsifiable claims. Consider: “There is an odourless, invisible, intangible, undetectable fairy in my room”.

(A) is unfalsifiable because what it would take to falsify it, is to show that at least one unfalsifiable claim is false. But this is impossible, because any unfalsifiable claim could not be shown to be false.

 (B) "All true claims are unfalsifiable"

(B) is true and unfalsifiable. It is true because, suppose a claim is true, then there is no way that it could be falsified (i.e. shown to be false) because it is not false.

It is unfalsifiable just because it is true, and whatever is true is unfalsifiable, as was shown above.

Now, many people think we should not believe in unfalsifiable hypotheses. If all truths are unfalsifiable, does that mean we should not believe in them also? No. Even if a true hypothesis is unfalsifiable, given that it is a true hypothesis, it can still be falsifiable given our knowledge. That is, it can be epistemically falsifiable. So, we might say about a hypothesis that we are not certain is true: “For all we know, it could be false, and such-and-such evidence would falsify it”. This is the sense of falsifiability that is relevant for judging a hypothesis.