This is part 4 of a series on Science, an examination of its foundations and the limits of our knowledge and methods in general. The first part was about the fundamentally human nature of Science, the second part on the blindspots of literal language, the third part on the limits of controlling variables, and the following parts are: Part 5 on how empiricism is secondary within institutions, and finally Part 6 on the limits of utilitarianism, which is the ultimate purpose of Science.
The third point about falsifiability, which I hinted at in the beginning of the series, is that falsifiability cannot apply to itself. It applies to scientific theories we can test, but it is a logical principle, not grounded in empirical reality. Which begs the question: why do we always have to make assumptions to build our knowledge? Even in the purely abstract field of mathematics, we have to take axioms for granted, and then and only then can we start to explore the consequences, define objects and properties and establishe theorems.
The fundamental reason is that the mind works with representations of Reality, not Reality itself, and that those are subject to the 3 principles of literal thinking we highlighted in part 2 about literal language, which are 1) literacy/spatiality 2) causality/temporality and 3) consistency.
A rather striking consequence of all of this is that the mind always works with relative notions, never with the thing-in-itself. A tree for instance is defined as "a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground." We can understand such a definition by knowing what "wood", "plant", "trunk", "branches", "ground" and "root" mean, and it is useful of course to relate all of those parts together, but still, this doesn't change the fact that this game of definitions is purely internal, it never tells you what the tree-in-itself is, and rather keeps answering the question away.
Contrast this with experiencing a tree directly, or even an artist's depiction. Even if the latter is still a representation, there is something truthful about art because it is primarily concerned with experience itself rather than breaking down Reality into mind-related parts. Whereas asking a question to a scientist leads to more questions about other things, an artist would simply paint a tree and we are left to experience it directly.
This doesn't mean that art is "better" than Science, it is silly to compare two utterly different fields in such a way, but it means that Art, at its best, is concerned with the ground of our lives, which is conscious experience, whereas Science is concerned with the secondary matter of knowledge through the intermediary of the mind.
Art can of course be second rate, as in the case of pornography, which Darren Allen defines as "the entirely unmysterious attraction of the unreal, or invented" 1, which takes us away from our senses and puts us in our solipsistic bubble of fantasies and emotions. Instead of seeing our lover through their gentle, loving eyes, we see a body which we can fuck for our own satisfaction. Instead of getting us "closer" to Reality, pornography feeds our fantasies, which makes us grow more detached and insensitive to the people and things around us.
Returning back to the subject of how the mind only knows relatively, we can see this in how physicists answer fundamental questions. Ask them a question related to the nature of time, matter, gravity, electromagnetism, entropy, and what they will do is start a sophisticated game of misdirection, because your question will not be answered directly but rather answered away.
You would be hard-pressed to find a definition of time which doesn't involve the words "past", "present" or "future", which are already temporal constructs, revealing the circular nature of the mind. Another approach, more sophisticated perhaps, is to relate time into a larger framework, such as General Relativity. There, the physicist would tell you that time is one of four dimensions of curved spacetime, which allows us to describe how objects move around with respect to Gravity. Even when an object is seemingly standing still, it is nonetheless moving through time, in a trajectory which is influenced by the gravitational field of the ambient spacetime.
Ignoring the circularity of my second definition where I use terms like "move", "still" and "trajectory" which also imply a temporality, which could simply be attributed to my clumsiness, the definition begs even more questions about the nature of space, gravity and matter, something which frustrates young children who are keen on playing the game of "Why?" on and on, until an adult has to tell them that this is simply how things are.
Viewing time this way also does something rather interesting, in that it sneakily frames it as a spatial representation of time, in the form of the arrow, or a dimension of a linear space. We spend so much time (hah) with this spatial representation, 2 in the form of the clock, or the arrow of history, that we start to confuse our direct experience of time, which is certainly not spatial, with its representation. This mismatch is why of course one hour can feel like an eternity, or seem to zip by, because our awareness of conscious experience can increase or diminish. But in the spatial representation of time, such nuances are homogenized away, and one hour becomes one hour no matter what.
If you keep playing this game of asking about fundamental definitions, what you will inevitably find are circular definitions. They might not be as obvious as the ones I have shown, instead of being 1-circular (A is defined using A) or 2-circular (A is defined using B, B is defined using A), they might be 3-circular or even more, but still, because the mind has fundamentally no access to Reality itself, its finite graph of concepts must necessarily loop back onto itself. After all, if you have a finite number of nodes, and each of those must link to one or several other nodes to be defined, you will necessarily find at least one loop in your graph. 3
This might be disturbing to people who try to ignore conscious reality, but even physicists and mathematicians, when they are honest, refer to plain old experience to ground their concepts. Einstein for instance defined time as "what a clock measures". This is not a scientific definition for sure, but it's also a much more practical one, and has the virtue of not answering away. The pragmatic scientist recognizes that there is a lens we need to use to build models, which gives us scientific language and which is most definitely useful, 4 but because models are not Reality themselves, they cannot be grounded entirely in that scientific language, which is why the game of asking fundamental questions cannot be resolved without referral to conscious experience.
Let's return to the point mentioned at the beginning of this piece, which is that falsifiability doesn't apply to itself. How would we construct an experiment to show that falsifiability is false? Well the immediate problem is that falsifiability is not a scientific theory which we can test in the real world, it's an abstract principle, one which in fact has not always been verified in the history of Science.
As mentioned in part 1, just because a theory meets a few contradicting data points does not imply that it is wise to immediately throw it away, because of various reasons: our measurements are imperfect, it is always possible that there are factors we haven't taken into account, or there are explanations which have yet to be provided.
If we did such a thing, Science as the evolving field it is would not progress, because everything would favor the current status quo. It is often for instance said that Galileo's heliocentric model was dismissed because of the dogma of the church at the time, but this is a very incomplete story. 5 First of all, Galileo was one of the few people to use a telescope at the time, which seems like it couldn't be a controversial matter, but think about how strange it would be in today's times for someone to make claims using an instrument which no one else used. The immediate explanation you would probably have is that their instrument is faulty, because for them to be correct, the entire combination consisting of their instrument, observations and theory would need to be so.
Secondly, the geocentric model was in fact better at making predictions than the newer heliocentric model, due to having a much longer history and people being more adept at using it. Crucially however is the fact that heliocentrism exposes you to a number of questions with regards to the rotation of the Earth. Namely, why do we not feel the Earth spinning under our feet, and why does dropping an object from a high altitude lead it to drop in a straight line, as opposed to land next to where we dropped it from, due to the rotation of the Earth? These questions are obvious now that we know about inertia and frames of reference, but they were not obvious at the times of Galileo, and it's unlikely that he could have given a satisfying answer.
Nonetheless, Galileo's theory wasn't invalidated for the rest of History, thankfully, which is an example of how blindly following falsifiability could lead us to set aside theories which leads us to more interesting avenues, but are currently lacking in arguments and other theories to make them whole.
As I've said, falsifiability is an abstract principle, not a theory per se, but even on the basis of general usefulness for investigation, it is not necessarily good to blindly follow it because a "false" theory can simply be incomplete, as opposed to being totally unfruitful. We cannot come to radical conclusions if every step along the way needs to comply to rigid standards, the process of exploration necessarily implies uncertainty and some amount of good faith.
Paradigm shifts do not come from well-trained technicians doing predictable work within established standards, rather they come from innately curious people who are interested in poking the boundaries of our established knowledge, and providing more satisfying explanations, such as Einstein trying to piece together curious facts, such as how the speed of light could be constant, (isn't speed supposed to be relative?) and how two objects of different masses fall at the same speed (in the absence of air resistance).
1 From Video games are not an artform
2 We also use words such as "long", "short", "near" and "far" to talk about time.
3 This is a simple result in graph theory which you can prove as such: take a given node A out of the n nodes you have. Since every node points to at least one other node, you can keep following a path from A forever, which means you can construct a path of arbitrary length. A path of length n+1 starting from A traverses at most n nodes, which means that at some point, it will loop back onto itself, not necessarily at A, but somewhere, through the pigeonhole principle. This means we have just constructed a loop, a way in which our system of definitions refers to itself.
4 Science always bottoms out as being useful, as expanded upon in a later part because that is the only thing that models can be. Academics present their work as the quest for Truth, but it isn't the case, the mind does not know Truth, only representation.
5 See for instance Against Method by Paul Feyerabend
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Science Authority Epistemology Loopiness Mind Literacy
2025-10-22