Question at position 21 A researcher claims, “Dreams predict the future, but only for people who truly believe in them.” Why can’t this claim be tested scientifically?It does not have a hypothesisIt is provableIt is unethical to studyIt is not falsifiable

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The question asks why a claim like “Dreams predict the future, but only for people who truly believe in them” cannot be tested scientifically.
Option 1: 'It does not have a hypothesis' — In scientific testing, a hypothesis is needed, but the core issue here is not merely the absence of a hypothesis; rather, the problem is related to falsifiability. A claim could be framed as a hypothesis, but that framing would not make it testable if it cannot be empirically contradicted. So this option misses the central criterion of testability.
Option 2: 'It is provable' — If a claim were truly provable, it would be scientific knowledge, but in science, many claims are not provable in the absolute sense; they’re supported or refuted by evidence. Labeling the claim as provable does not address why it cannot be tested or falsified, and this option misunderstands the scientific standard of testability rather than engaging with falsifiability.
Option 3: 'It is unethical to study' — Ethical considerations can limit or shape research, but ethics alone does not inherently prevent testing a claim. Many controversial or sensitive topics are studied with ethical safeguards. Therefore, this option attributes an ethical barrier that isn’t the fundamental reason for non-testability.
Option 4: 'It is not falsifiable' — This is the core issue. A claim is scientifically testable only if there is a possible observation or experiment that could prove it false. Because the statement relies on belief to determine when dreams predict the future, and this condition cannot be operationally defined in a way that could be contradicted by evidence, it fails the falsifiability criterion. In other words, no experiment could potentially disprove it, so it cannot be tested scientifically.
In summary, the primary reason the claim cannot be tested scientifically is that it is not falsifiable, meaning there’s no possible empirical observation that could disprove it. The other options touch on related ideas (hypothesis formation, provability, ethics), but they do not pinpoint the fundamental barrier to scientific testing here: the lack of falsifiability.

Question at position 21 A researcher claims, “Dreams predict the future, but only for people who truly believe in them.” Why can’t this claim be tested scientifically?It does not have a hypothesisIt is provableIt is unethical to studyIt is not falsifiable

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