Quote Originally Posted by squark View Post
Yes @Singu, you're correct, it's an established principle that you can't prove a theory true, you can only prove it false. And yes, that is a key part of scientific thinking.
How do you think that connects with Socionics? I don't necessarily think that this principle is limited to science, but it applies to all knowledge in general.

But I think what's more slightly significant, is that people seem to be obsessed with finding "evidence", as if evidence would be the deciding factor in changing anything. Evidence is only as useful as what the theory is telling us to look for and the experiment that it is conducting.

Should we look for the "evidence" that there are 16 types? But then the premise is already that there ought to be 16 types, so no amount of evidence would change anything. If we look for evidence that there are 16 types, then yes, there would be "evidence" for it everywhere (and I'm sure that there'd also be evidence for any other arbitrary numbers of types). And if we couldn't find any evidence, then we might just say that we're not trying hard enough to find it.

So what actually is the role of evidence? It can only be the deciding factor when there are two or more rival theories attempting to solve some problem, and one correctly yields the result of what it's predicted to put out, and other does not, and hence one gets accepted and the other get rejected.

So finding "evidence" is definitely not the main point, because you can easily make a theory that fits in with any kind of evidence, and hence the theory is proven to be correct or at least not falsified, but the theory may not be very useful in solving some problem. The criteria of a theory is always going to be based around whether it can solve the problem or not.