Descartes’ global dream argument predates The Matrix by almost half a millennium. Neither did Men in Black invent the conjecture that we’re in constant contact with creatures from other planets. That they’re fully visible. But they’re also very shy. And so whenever they see us seeing them, they shoot us with a forget-me ray, and, sure enough, we forget. Does anyone remember seeing one of them? No? Well, that just confirms that it must be true.

One needn’t be a rocket surgeon to see what’s gone wrong here. Since the hypothesis is such that nothing could count as evidence that it’s false, it’s (what philosophers of science call) non-falsifiable. And if it’s non-falsifiable, it can’t count as a scientific, i.e. empirical, claim. Which is not to say it couldn’t nonetheless be true. That is, it’s entirely possible that we are being visited by creatures from outer space who, upon being seen, shoot us with a forget-me ray. It’s just that, under the circumstances, we’d have no way of knowing it.

Nor, of course, of knowing that it’s false. So the most we can do is suspend judgment and, well, move on.

Just as an aside, some people think the same can be said of any number of conjectures, including, for example, the God hypothesis. But the difference here is that, unlike the shy aliens hypothesis, theism touts itself as the argument to the best explanation. Of what? Well, that the world seems to exhibit order. Order implies purposivity, and purposivity implies a purposor. Quad erat demonstrandum.

Well, maybe not quite. But whether of explanatory use or not, the God hypothesis is non-falsifiable, because absence of proof is not proof of absence, and given the elements of the hypothesis, including God’s invisibility, neither could anything count as proof of God’s absence. So if, for you, the God hypothesis is the best explanation for the seeming orderedness of the world, you’re not being epistemically irresponsible in embracing it. The same would be true of the shy aliens hypothesis if it too covered something otherwise less explicable. But it doesn’t. And so, and rightly so, we dismiss it.

All that said, what I want to argue here is that the dismissibility of a non-falsifiable hypothesis can be, and should be, expanded from a) there being nothing that could count as evidence against the hypothesis to b) there being nothing that will be allowed to count as evidence against it. What I have in mind are cases where there’s been a political decision, perhaps even a legal decision, that such and such is the case, and we’re strictly forbidden to offer, let alone consider, evidence against it. In fact even to ask a question about it. And my claim is that there being nothing that’ll be allowed to count against a hypothesis should render it for all intents and purposes non-falsifiable.

And therefore, in like manner, dismissible? We’ll have to see.

The most obvious example is, of course, the Shoah, a.k.a. the Holocaust. In a number of jurisdictions – and that number is increasing – it’s a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust. But where’s the line between denial and revision? Note that I don’t say ‘mere’ revision, because in most of these polities revisionism just is denialism. Was it six million or only five? If only five could it have been only four? Need genocide be intentional or could it be a mere autonomous effect? And so on. But if one can’t ask these questions, let alone offer unsanctioned answers to them, then that it was both six and intentional is rendered, in this attenuated sense, non-falsifiable.

Was it always non-falsifiable? Presumably not. It became non-falsifiable over time. By contrast, the God hypothesis, though always non-falsifiable in the strict sense, was for many centuries non-falsifiable in my attenuated sense. That is, on pain of death one was not allowed to even question it. So falsifiability and contestability are orthogonal cuts. The Holocaust is falsifiable in the strict sense but uncontestable and therefore non-falsifiable in the for-all-intents-and-purposes sense.

The less obvious example, but an example nonetheless, is the claim that there are 215 indigenous children buried in an apple orchard adjacent to the Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C. The claim is certainly falsifiable in the strict sense. All one has to do is excavate. But it’s non-falsifiable in the for-all-intents-and-purposes sense, because no such excavation is being allowed. Can the claim therefore be dismissed? If not, why not? And if so, then why not the Holocaust?

This dialectic is leading us somewhere, but where? Three possibilities. The first is that disallowing any revisiting of our sacred beliefs – no matter how precious those beliefs might be – renders those beliefs automatically dismissible. So unless you’re going to let us excavate, your claim is literally nonsense. Given the argument just presented, that seems inescapable. But it seems a bit harsh. You say there are children buried there and I respond as I would to you saying we’re being visited by visible but shy aliens.

So to avoid this unsavoury result, the second possible takeaway is that any and all such prohibitions are to be forthwith withdrawn. That is, everything is on the table, including the Holocaust. That salvages the meaningfulness of your claim that there are children buried in Kamloops, but at the same time it places the burden on you to find six million Jewish birth certificates. And that seems equally harsh.

And the third is to decide that there are some special claims – not many but some – that, given the current political climate, it would just be too churlish not to leave them in their for-all-intents-and-purposes non-falsifiable condition.

That might prove the least offensive route to take, but the problem, of course, is that we don’t seem to agree on which special claims these might be. For example, those of us who reject any and all forms of indigenous exceptionalism would be fine with these indigenous communities and their allies believing whatever they like about what lies beneath that ground, just as long as they don’t demand the rest of us believe it. But that’s precisely what they do demand. And that they demand it is precisely isomorphic to the demands of the medieval church vis a vis the filioque. Grave heretics aren’t burned at the stake in Canada in 2024, but they are fired from their jobs.

And, of course, the same is happening to scientists expressing doubts about climate change, mandatory vaccinations, ethicists that trans-women are women … The list goes on. On the argument being offered here, what these scientists and ethicists should be saying is that climate change, vaccine efficacy, gender self-identification, and so on, are not, as they’ve been wont to say at their peril, contestable, but simply non-falsifiable. What would remain to be seen is whether equating climate change to shy aliens would salvage their jobs. I suspect not. But surely it’s worth a try.

Categories: Critical Thinking, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask

Tags: climate change, Covid vaccines, falsifiabiity, Indian Residential Schools, Kamloops graves, Men in Black, theism, trans-women