Take a moment to look at the above-indicated picture of Italian painter Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Suppose I definitively claimed that it’s a beautiful work of art. You may agree, disagree, or perhaps hold another opinion altogether.
How might one determine the validity of my claim—exploring the quality of my statement in regards to a logically or factually sound declaration? What might you think if I told you that my claim meets the standard of unfalsifiability—that which is incapable of being proved false?
Perhaps use of the scientific method could assist with proving my hypothesis—a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. Is my hypothesis about The Birth of Venus being a “beautiful” work of art an unfalsifiable supposition? According to one source:
The fallacy of unfalsifiability / untestibility / unfalsifiable claims fallacy occurs when a proposition is presented with a claim that it is falsifiable, but the proposition is maintained as true no matter what evidence is presented. In other words, an unfalsifiable proposition is claimed to be falsifiable.
Perhaps you’ve heard people claim that beauty is subjective. Others argue that there may be some element of objectivity in relation to what people consider beautiful, on average. Still, is there a way of testing my hypothesis about The Birth of Venus serving as a “beautiful” work of art? Of this, one source clarifies:
A hypothesis must be testable to ensure that it is valid. For example, a hypothesis that depends on what a bear thinks is not testable, because it can never be known what a bear thinks. It should also be falsifiable, meaning that it can be disproven by experimental results. An example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis is “Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is beautiful.” There is no experiment that might show this statement to be false. To test a hypothesis, a researcher will conduct one or more experiments designed to eliminate one or more of the hypotheses. This is important. A hypothesis can be disproven, or eliminated, but it can never be proven. Science does not deal in proofs like mathematics. If an experiment fails to disprove a hypothesis, then we find support for that explanation, but this is not to say that down the road a better explanation will not be found, or a more carefully designed experiment will be found to falsify the hypothesis.
Given this understanding, we may conclude that because a hypothesis can never be proven, I can’t possibly prove that The Birth of Venus is beautiful. Noteworthy, with unfalsifiability, the following logical form is used:
Logical Form:
X is true (when X is cannot possibly be demonstrated to be false)
Therefore, you can’t objectively falsify my claim about The Birth of Venus, nor can I absolutely prove my hypothesis is true. To put a final point on this matter, consider the following source:
An unfalsifiable argument can be qualified and amended at will. For instance, the statement “faith can move mountains” is unfalsifiable: if you cannot move mountains, that only shows that you haven’t enough faith.
As such, there’s no rational point to continue a conversation about my claim regarding the inherent beauty of the painting. After all, if you disagreed with my assertion, I could always retort, “Well, the fact that you don’t think the painting is beautiful only shows that you don’t know what beauty is.”
I think it’s important to know how the unfalsifiability fallacy works. Understanding how pointless so many matters about which people disagree, and how these disagreements may lead to conflict, we can begin to set aside irrational demands and simply agree to disagree with one another.
Then again, I believe that an undetectable force within the universe grants me power to objectively determine what is and isn’t beautiful for all people. You don’t share my belief? Well, prove that the force doesn’t exist and hasn’t granted me this power!
(See what I did there?)
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Deric Hollings, LPC, LCSW
References:
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Fleming, D. (n.d.). Unfalsifiability. Lean Logic. Retrieved from https://leanlogic.online/glossary/unfalsifiability/
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Sainani, K. L. (2015, October 7). Q&A: David Deutsch. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a
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Wikipedia. (n.d.). Sandro Botticelli. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandro_Botticelli
Wikipedia. (n.d.). The Birth of Venus. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus