Science has been defined judicially
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2026 12:09 am
Some busybodies put together a guide to science for US courts, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence 4th edition. Not surprisingly they define science.
"Communities engaged in scientific endeavors work with testable hypotheses. For a hypothesis to be testable, it must, by itself or in conjunction with other hypotheses, generate specific predictions— a set of observations that one could expect to make if the hypothesis were true and/or a set of observations that would be inconsistent with the idea and lead one to believe that it is not true. If an explanation is equally compatible with all possible observations, then it is not testable and hence, not within the reach of science."
I can work with that, it's basically Popper using the word testability instead of falsifiable. It's not as powerful as the concepts Feynman uses in Cargo Cult Science, but it is a good start.
"Communities engaged in scientific endeavors work with testable hypotheses. For a hypothesis to be testable, it must, by itself or in conjunction with other hypotheses, generate specific predictions— a set of observations that one could expect to make if the hypothesis were true and/or a set of observations that would be inconsistent with the idea and lead one to believe that it is not true. If an explanation is equally compatible with all possible observations, then it is not testable and hence, not within the reach of science."
I can work with that, it's basically Popper using the word testability instead of falsifiable. It's not as powerful as the concepts Feynman uses in Cargo Cult Science, but it is a good start.