Re: What's the Science of Dinosaurs?

["philidor11" <philidor11@snet.net>]

Feel like I'm taking more Final Bow[s] than Sherlock.
Once last.
I said:
 As an exemplar, is cladistics science?
 The short answer is No.
 The long answer is also No.
You replied:
Strange. Cladistics produces testable hypotheses based on observations of
facts.

But the test is only within a cladistic argument, using the same selected
cladistic logic.  What I choose to include and how I choose to include it
and what kind of cladistic logic I use will affect the result.
Does this type of test sound equivalent to the scientific method's test of a
hypothesis by determining an implication of the hypothesis which might be
found/not found in reality and then doing the experiment?

Also, I noted:
If it can't, then science is a social activity, shared by those who've leapt
to belief.
and you responded:
If it can't reach... truth? Probably it can, but we can't show something is
true, if we're really picky. That's why Popper talks about falsifiability,
not verifiability.

If reality is subjective, at least at present, then we're discussing
metaphysics here, not science.

Remember, this is the null hypothesis, the proposition that cladistics, as a
specific example, is not a science.  Before you can say your conclusions are
true in reality, you have to defeat the hypothesis.
In this case, that's not too easy, and I thought it might make an oers
d'oeuvre at the seasonal revels.
This time, I really do intend to consign this topic to the Suffolk apiary.