[MacDorcha]

"How can you truly "know" something if there's no way to "know" if that something is false?"

Such is the problem facing Science. If something CAN be false in science, it is taken as "scientific"

If it is SHOWN as false, it is dismissed or adjusted.

There is no focal point that can be "true" unless it can be "false" and upon being false, it is no longer true. An effective naturalistic response to the world, but conflicting. Notions are only good if they are possibly NOT? Daoism much?

Socrates posited that EVERYBODY knows "the Truth." The only task is to ask the correct questions. Any answer will lead to the next step in logic, and thus eventually to the "trail head" of truth.

[Dimensio]

If something CAN be false in science, it is taken as "scientific"

Let's not pretend that this is the only criteria for a scientific statement.

"God will show himself on May 7, 2005 at 1523EDT in Times Square in New York City" is a falsifiable statement, but it is not scientific.

If it is SHOWN as false, it is dismissed or adjusted.

Correct.

There is no focal point that can be "true" unless it can be "false"

Not quite. There is simply no way to accept as "true" a statement unless there is some hypothetical means by that it could evaluate as false. I'm not sure why you're trying to argue that this is somehow bad methodology, unless you're pushing to have any arbitrary nonsense pushed into science classrooms on a whim.

If there is absolutely no possible observation that would demonstrate that a statement is false, then the statement is fundamentally meaningless. There is no way to strengthen its validity, because you have no basis for comparing it to a contrary situation.

Socrates posited that EVERYBODY knows "the Truth." The only task is to ask the correct questions. Any answer will lead to the next step in logic, and thus eventually to the "trail head" of truth.

Okay, then. I "know" that "the Truth" is that the universe was created Last Thursday by the cat Queen Maeve. How do we proceed from there? What questions do we ask to lead ourselves to the "trail head" of this Truth?

[js1138]

Socrates posited that EVERYBODY knows "the Truth."

Socrates was full of if if he actually said this. Of course you can lead someone by asking questions. It's attempted in courtrooms every day. It's done by crystal ball gazers, politicians and all kinds of frauds.

Clinically, it's called cold reading. It's not particularly associated with truth.

[stremba]

Maybe the problem is a misunderstanding of what science is about. Science is not a search for truth. It is a search for ideas that are USEFUL, even if the truth of them will never be known. For example, how would you go about proving the truth of electron existence? It's easy to think of experiments whose outcomes would be different if electrons didn't exist, so proving the falsity of this idea would be easy if it were false. However, what would you do to prove that electrons actually exist? We can make predictions about experimental outcomes that would occur if electrons did exist, but the success of these predictions doesn't prove that electrons really do exist. However, to a working scientist, this distinction is irrelevant. Electrons are an accepted part of physics and chemistry precisely because they are useful. They help scientists describe the world in a coherent way and understand and predict other observations, so they are accepted. Even ideas that have been shown to be false are still and accepted part of science. Consider Newton's law of universal gravitation. This was proven false by experiments suggested by Einstein's theory of general relativity. However, NASA still managed to get the Apollo ships to the moon using Newton's law.