I sense we are wide apart in our understanding of what is involved here, RW. I am not of the school of British Empiricism, nor am I a pragmatist nor a positivist. Thus I do not believe that "representations of sensations, which we determine to be objects" are the sufficient grounds of the truth of reality. Further, logic seems to me not the exclusive criterion by which we can appraise "truth statements." Obviously, if statements are clearly illogical, then we are correct to suspect them. But perfectly logical things may be said and still be falsifications of reality.
I do agree that "we have no knowledge of reality except subjective" knowledge. But there are sources of subjective knowledge that are not tied exclusively to sense perceptions of the external world, and the objectivization of same. Revelation, intuition, perhaps even racial memory, would be examples.
Further, given that I am strongly influenced by Plato, I regard truth as a search, or quest, and never as a "final possession." As observers, we are limited in what we can know of the reality that surrounds us, because we are parts and participants in it, and have no privileged position from which we may view the totality of "all that there is" from a point of view outside that totality.
Other than divine truths (revelation), all truths are thus provisional, and subject to modification or falsification over time as we learn more about the reality we try to truthfully describe, according to our best lights. This seems to me particularly true of scientific truth, because it is exclusively based on observations of external phenomena which of necessity (given the scientific method) are abstracted from their contexts in order to be profitably studied. Parts thus separated from the wholes of which they are parts may not give a comprehensive account of the situation for the simple reason that wholes are ever more than the sum of their constituting parts.
Well, that would be for openers! Perhaps we'll have more to say (that's not the "editorial 'we'" there) on this topic in due course.
Thanks ever so much for writing!
Space and time and mathematics such as geometry and algebra for starters. Also the categories, be they Aristotle's or Kant's or somebody later who wonders where these particular categories came from if not from experience. All these are a priori or concepts not from sensation.
Science uniquely has a greater degree of confidence in theories which can be and are subjected to many attempts to falsify the theory.
I didn't notice this earlier and perhaps it is a typo, but in some spaces this is true: In the triangle inequality the whole is always more than the sum of its parts or equal but never less. In euclidian space it is not true.
Can you give me a specific example of a revelation that is not subject to falsification?