Callafangers wrote: ↑Wed Jan 28, 2026 6:21 pm
I want to thank SanityCheck for making my current response much easier -- i.e. no need for me to do a point-by-point to his last response -- by showcasing his ignorance as follows:
SanityCheck wrote:If the principle of falsifiability is as 'inescapable' as you claim, then it should be demonstrable for things like:
- The Beatles
SC/Terry apparently cannot tell the difference between these two items:
- X event of the 'Holocaust' happened at X location/time
- "The Beatles"
Here's his problem: the first item above is a
claim or prediction (principle of falsifiability applies), while the second item is the name of a band (not 'falsifiable').
I am glad we cleared that up.
FFS.
Well, no, you didn't. 'The Beatles' was a shorthand for 'the career and legacy of The Beatles', and paired with the history of the United States and within that, the histories of the 47 US Presidencies.
None of those things are 'falsifiable' at the general level without causing severe brain hurt, because they are massively attested; the range of audio, audiovisual and textual sources (recordings, TV shows, newspapers and magazines) capturing the career of The Beatles is truly overwhelming.
Many of the events in the career of The Beatles, like many of the events in a US Presidency, also meet this overwhelming standard. Other events and details might not.
That is the continuum of historical evidence; we can go from total overload to just a single source being all that survives about an individual, or an event. Very few sources may survive from the ancient world; the battle of Cannae is known primarily from just four texts, none of which are contemporary.
It's kind of amusing to see such an avowed antisemite cling so desperately to Popperian falsificationism, without being aware of the serious critiques of Popper and the difficulties with universal falsifiability as a criterion to determine what is and isn't science. The models offered by Kuhn ('paradigm shift', historicising the way that scientific theories and explanations are replaced and abandoned) and Lakatos ('progressive and degenerating research programmes') in response to Popper make more sense if one wishes to account for how scientific theories evolve or are abandoned, when challenged by contradictory evidence and refutations.
Most philosophers of science and history don't regard 'falsifiability' as much of a demarcation criterion due to Popper's quite hardline skepticism. They've also been hugely critical of the way the Supreme Court fumbled Popperian falsification in the Daubert (1993) ruling about the admissibility of expert witness evidence, since the judge conflated falsification with confirmation by invoking Popper back-to-back with mid-20th Century confirmationist Carl Hempel. The ruling seemed to conflate defining what is scientific with what is reliable, when in fact Popper was almost staggeringly disinterested in reliability. (This from an essay in Susan Haack, Evidence Matters).
Some of the applications of Daubert maintained the incoherence of juxtaposing Popper and Hempel, others dropped falsification quietly since the interpretation of what that meant in science was, the theory is well confirmed and has been used for ages (e.g. fingerprinting)
and has not yet been falsified. Essentially postponing the supposed moment of falsifiable truth to the future, rather than as appears to be the case with Callafangers' reading of 'falsifiability', an inherent property of all theories and claims whether scientific or historical.
Rejecting falsifiability as an inherent aspect of all scientific theories without which the theory or claim "isn't scientific" does not mean that theories and claims are not routinely refuted, regarded as insufficiently proven, and so on.
The weirdness of Popperianism is imagining that scientists and researchers apply falsificationism and waste their time trying to think of ways in which, say, a newspaper article might be wrong, when reading the newspaper article.
It is only when one reads
many newspaper articles from a particular era and society that one appreciates the assumptions, cultural values, political slants, religiosity or lack thereof, and can evaluate the quality of reporting, to be able to spot the propaganda stories, the political spin, the false reports, bad journalism, good journalism, and conscious or unconscious biases. Reading media from explicitly different political perspectives tends to help. Reading historical newspapers, one would do the same thing when studying a conflict-ridden era.
Reading newspaper articles (contemporary or historical) is no different to reading series of other sources, such as memoirs, affidavits, oral histories, letters, diaries, court judgements, government reports, secret service reports or military reports. An impersonator publishing a memoir and being exposed as a fraud doesn't invalidate the value of all other memoirs; the use of such sources is not an 'all swans are white' theory of perfection, refuted by one black swan.
I suspect Callafangers likes the sound of falsifiability for the same reason that Germar Rudolf touted Popper as proof of his great training as a scientist (while being ignorant of how philosophers of science had seriously moved on from Popper, and displaying almost no awareness of the philosophy of history or historical method manuals). It promises to justify their lazy negationism. They then need only devise tests and criteria to disprove things, while ignoring other routes to revising knowledge of the past and refuting an existing explanation with a better one.
There hasn't been a 'paradigm shift' towards revisionism in part because the negationist method cannot be generalised without eventually goring someone's ox and inadvertently denying a mass atrocity they do care about. The double standards regarding evidence have to be maintained. Rudolf and other revisionists will routinely hype up huge numbers for Stalinist violence while displaying zero awareness of the literature, sources or physical sites.
This emerged quite clearly with Callafangers' debacle at Waterloo, which he brought up to discuss a different set of mass graves, unaware that the physical evidence of bones and remains he presumably thought would be there disappeared about two centuries ago.
As with other aspects of the modern era, the physical evidentiary landscape of the graves and sites from wars, conflicts, massacres, genocides is highly uneven, and also has not been investigated ('tested') evenly. In many cases the graves are now cemeteries - individual or mass grave burial sites - with memorials and are not going to be dug up just on someone's say-so. Thus the 'test' which would provide "falsifiability" is unavailable as a general tool.
The overwhelming majority of violent death tolls in modern history would thus be 'unfalsifiable' by revisionist standards. There aren't the resources to 'reverify' most of the deaths from the modern violent past, and by the time there might be, many of the sites will have faded away, like medieval and ancient sites, based on our existing predictions of grave conditions through extensive previous experience with taphonomy and other archaeological approaches.
History considers historical sources for sites of mass violence, including the results of past or recent forensics and archaeology if they are available, alongside photographs (during/after the violence), documents and eyewitness accounts. All of these are 'testable' and can often be corrected through comparing them and applying fairly standard forms of source criticism. The initial overestimate by a distant witness is corrected when sources closer to the site are found, while patterns of violence are then considered in relation to censuses, data in historical records and reports and other records.
For the Holocaust, a major confounding factor is the widespread practice of cremating the bodies of victims, which was also seen extensively for other targeted groups and at other sites, like T4 euthanasia centres, the 'ordinary' KZs in the Reich, and indeed for other victims, such as
some of the victims of Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945.
The revisionist side overplayed its hand just over 25 years ago when Richard Krege tried pretending that ground penetrating radar proved the ground at Treblinka II was entirely undisturbed. That was wholly untrue, which should have been apparent from considering the historical sources about the site in the 1940s and subsequently, which pointed instead to substantial disturbance of the ground, extensive human remains and the presence of cremains. In the run up to the unveiling of the Treblinka memorial in the 1960s, journalists reported that one could still kick over bone fragments there - maybe they were lying? But the same has been reported from the Reinhard camps by 21st Century visitors, along with the various archaeologists who've investigated Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka on repeated occasions in the past 25+ years. Maybe they're all lying? But that starts to expand the conspiracy relentlessly, when there are numerous sources from the 1940s confirming this, not just the say-so of the official Polish investigations, but photographs showing bones, and reports of other observers noting the grave robbing going on.
The pattern of open air cremation, overlapping with the use of crematoria in KZs due to the mix at Birkenau, makes it essentially impossible to verify or falsify the death tolls using physical investigative means. All of the methods proposed by internet revisionists over the years, such as sieving the soil and counting teeth, would not produce a reliable result, especially as cremains were in a number of cases taken away for dispersal elsewhere, which is certainly true of Birkenau, where cremains were reportedly disposed of into the Sola river, in addition to being dumped into various places around the camp site, or remaining buried in other places.
Grave dimensions cannot be used for certain of these sites due to cremation starting earlier, while it was vastly easier to reduce other totals through discovering textual sources, i.e. historical documents, fitting with other textual sources, as with the reduction of the Belzec death toll from 600,000 to a maximum of 434,000 after the discovery of the Hoefle telegram in the early 2000s, essentially now 25 years ago.
As I have said consistently for 15 or more years, the way to revise history is to locate new evidence which would firstly confirm and explain why the reports and witnesses saying mass murder were incorrect, for whatever reasons - a deliberate conspiracy or some other mechanism. This does need to be done with all camps considered together, alongside the shootings and entangled examples like T4.
Secondly, showing that the deportations to the camps in fact went elsewhere, and also accounting for the on-the-spot killings. That does mean looking behind and ahead to the ghettos - 687 inside the 1939 borders of Poland - and killing sites - another 1000 or so in the Baltic states and pre-1939 USSR.
The evidentiary landscape for these sites, as well as deportation points elsewhere in Europe, is unsurprisingly uneven. But that does mean some parts are pretty much unfalsifiable - the Vel d'Hiv round-up in Paris in July 1942 is one example of a massively attested event, preceding extensive sourcing for deportations from Drancy to Auschwitz. So is the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto: the prior existence of the ghetto from 1940-July 1942 is overwhelmingly attested, there are sources in abundance for the course of the deportations, which is also true for Jan-May 1943 when they were renewed. Ditto for Hungary '44, contra Butz's feeble efforts fifty years ago.
Both angles require being woven together into a narrative, which is an effective means of testing out the plausibility of the various claims and hypotheses, one that is widely understood and appreciated. It's all very well if revisionists aren't convinced by 'the Holocaust narrative' but they're not in fact exempt from the need to provide their own, if they want to be more than negationists and live up to their self-styled names as
revisionists.
In Popperian terms, this specifies several criteria which would 'falsify' the conventional understanding and which would be in principle possible (however remotely): just as US courts have noted that certain scientific methods have proven reliable and have not yet been 'falsified', the discovery of new evidence can falsify and revise. Maybe Stubble can pull a rabbit out of his hat, maybe some future revisionist researcher does the trick, or maybe it all trails off into frustration.
