<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 6:22 PM ∄ uǝlƃ <<a href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com">gepropella@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">What I'm doing is defining a mechanism that *might* generate the phenomenon of interest. It's typical simulation. If <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"></span>it *cannot* generate the phenomenon, then that falsifies this mechanism, which is what we want, falsifiable hypotheses.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">What do you mean by "generate the phenomenon"? If the phenomenon is non-existent, it can't be generated. Even if that weren't a problem, who is to judge whether "the phenomenon" had been generated? And how is that judgment made? </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">On the other hand, how do you establish that "<span class="gmail_default"></span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">it *cannot* generate the phenomenon"?  That sounds like a pretty hard thing to establish on the basis of empirical evidence.</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">This all seems to be digging a deeper hole.</span></div></div></div>