The error comes about from half-understanding something that everyone is taught in university science classes. But you can’t disprove their theory, and it’s a mistake to think you can.
#Not even wrong quote free
If someone chooses to believe in such a hypothesis, then you’re free to disagree with them. It’s indeterminate – it can never be proved one way or the other. What I object to is the fallacious assumption that a non-testable hypothesis, on a metaphysical subject, is wrong by definition. That’s what people are referring to when they say “not even wrong”. It may be right, and it may be wrong – it’s a matter of individual belief. So a metaphysical hypothesis can’t be proved right, and it can’t be proved wrong. It encompasses everything within the scope of human experience that isn’t part of the physical world. Metaphysics is all about belief and subjectivity. If they disagree, then it must be wrong.īy definition, any meaningful hypothesis about the physical world must be testable.Įqually by definition, hypotheses about metaphysics aren’t going to be testable. If the results of the experiment agree with the predictions, then the hypothesis may be right. For a hypothesis to be “scientific” it needs to make predictions that can be tested by experiment. The defining characteristic of the physical world is that it’s amenable to repeatable experiments.
This is a brilliant concept when it’s taken in its proper context. One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is the idea of the testable hypothesis. You can’t apply a tool that was specifically designed for the physical world to something that is non-physical.
What they aren’t entitled to do-and yet they insist on doing-is to attempt to disprove metaphysical theories through the application of the scientific method. Materialistic scientists, from Wolfgang Pauli to Richard Dawkins, are perfectly entitled to hold the belief that the metaphysical world is non-existent. The metaphysical world is the realm of belief and subjective experience. The physical world is the realm of experiment and objective analysis. In those days the distinction was between “earth” and “heaven”, although today we are more likely to say “physics” and “metaphysics”. Even the greatest scientists accepted that the physical world-and hence the applicability of the scientific method-was only part of the sum total of human experience. The kind of aggressive, materialistic atheism associated with science today was virtually unknown in those days. When the scientific method was first developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was understood that it was applicable only to a subset of human experience – namely to phenomena that take place in the physical world. There is simply no way of telling whether it's right or wrong. A theory that is “not even wrong” is one that is permanently stuck in a state of indeterminacy.
Right and wrong are extremes, and anything that is not right, and not wrong, must lie somewhere in the indeterminate region between the two extremes. There is no such thing as “worse than wrong”.
Even Pauli himself seems to have used the phrase as a pejorative (the correct equation was photoshopped onto the blackboard by me, as if you hadn’t guessed). That’s not because it’s used incorrectly, but because the people who use it think it means “worse than wrong”, which it doesn’t. I still get annoyed when people use it, though. The phrase may sound like a contradiction in terms, but actually it has a precise and literal meaning. “Not even wrong” was coined by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1950s, and it’s widely used by scientists to describe theories that are fundamentally non-scientific. Following my deconstruction of Einstein’s “ spooky action at a distance” a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d have a go at another hackneyed quote from the world of physics.
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