I don't know what a "philosophical proof" is, sorry.
Reasoning from abstract principles about general truths.
By "true" I mean admitting of no other explanation.
That's a very peculiar meaning of true. This means that none of the givens in a scientific problem can be true, because data is not explanatory.
To me "experimental verification" means the experiment did not disprove the hypothesis; not at all the same thing as "proving" it.
But perhaps you favor a different definition?
Uh, yes. To verify means to show that something is true. To falsify is to show that something is false. The two terms were coined as alternatives to each other
by a philosopher (not by the application of scientific methods).
You are making a philosophical assertion, without proof, that
all conceivable empirical theories cannot be shown to be true. That said, I'm glad we agree that one can't "prove" a "scientific hypothesis" to be "true."
We do not agree.
Your sentence, "we agree that one can't 'prove' a 'scientific hypothesis' to be 'true'" is not true.
The use of the word "true" in my preceding sentence does not mean "fails to exhaust all possible explanations."
It means that your proposition does not correspond to the facts in evidence.
What I said here is not the proposition you have submitted above as the grounds of our agreement:
Hint: If by "absolute proof" you mean "derived from self-evident principles or from deductions from self-evident principles," then what you have said means, "There is no philosophical proof that can take the place of experimental verification." We can agree on that.
You have not explained what you meant by "absolute proof" as distinct from "proof."
I have agreed that philosophical considerations are not a substitute for empirical methods.
I have not agreed with your philosophy that "there is no proof of a scientific theory."
I absolutely agree the Milliken experiment provided "experimental verification" that charge is quantized. In other words, the results were completely consistent with that particular hypothesis; the hypothesis was not disproved by the experiment. But neither was it "proved" by it.
It is your funny definition of proof that leads you to your peculiar conclusion that there is something over and above "verification" that is required.
I don't see how we can be completely sure no other (different) experiment can ever yield a result inconsistent with the hypothesis. Very unlikely, I admit, but impossible?
The Milliken experiment depends on the definition of terms related to a specific set of givens. Given the meaning of those terms in those conditions, the experiment proves
Milliken's hypothesis to be true in all similar conditions. Under other conditions (the inflationary period immediately after the Big Bang) the phenomenon we now know as electrical charge may have behaved differently. But that does not mean that under the current conditions anything further is required to trust that Milliken's theory is true--it corresponds to the way that things are.
Finally, my original statement that "Falsification of hypotheses is the [emphasis added] basis of the scientific method" was perhaps a bit too dogmatic, but to me this is the key feature that distinguishes the scientific method from other ways of trying to explain what we observe. That's all I meant.
I understand that is what you meant.
I ask you to note that it is a philosophical statement.
It is not self-evident.
It does not come from logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, archaeology, anatomy, physiology, or any of a multitude of permutations and combinations of the empirical sciences.
It is a generalization that may or may not be true.
By "true" I mean a correct description of what is.
Your definition of "true" ("exclusive explanation") does not work in this context.
I believe your proposition is false ("not a correct description of how all empirical sciences work").
It is a principle of logic that if you reason from false premises, the conclusions you reach will be false.
In
Modeling Nature, William Wallace presents eight examples where empirical science has found the true cause of phenomena
under the conditions within which we live in this universe:
1. The optics of the rainbow (Theodoric--another Dominican--1311; pp. 324-334)
2. Planetary astronomy (Galileo, 1610; pp. 334-340)
A. Mountains on the moon (pp. 335-36)
B. Moons of Jupiter (pp. 337-38)
C. Phases of Venus (pp. 338-40)
3. The physics of falling bodies (Galileo, 1590-1609; pp. 341-350)
4. The circulation of the blood (Harvey, 1628; pp. 350-355)
5. The nature of light and color (Newton, 1672; pp. 355-359)
6. Universal gravitation (Newton, 1713; pp. 359-363)
7. Atoms and Molecules (Antoine Lavoisier [1743-1794], Joseph Luis Gay-Lussac [1778-1850], John Dalton [1766-1844], Amedeo Avogadro [1776-1856], Stanislao Cannizzaro [1826-1910]; basic history of the controversy: 1808-1860; pp. 364-369).
8. The structure of DNA (Watson & Crick, 1953; pp. 369-376)
To this I have added the results of the Milliken experiment: "What we
mean by electricity is caused by the movement of particles all of which have the same unit charge." It is clear that the meaning of "particles" has changed over the last century, but the awareness of wave-particle duality has not eradicated his finding. Given the meaning of the terms used in his theory and the evaluation of the results of his experiment, Milliken proved that
what he claimed was true. That there is a great deal more now to be said about electro-magnetic phenomena is also
true.