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Answer by Rex Kerr for Is the claim "this coin is fair" falsifiable?

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The question is, interpreted literally, neither answerable nor useful to ask.

Operationally, what people mean when they ask such questions is something like, "Assuming that this coin contains no temporally-varying internal state that will alter its behavior upon flipping (at least not on the time scale that I care about), is there evidence for the hypothesis that this coin will systematically come up on one side more frequently / more times than the other?"

And the answer there is, yes: from statistics, to whatever degree of certainty you want, if you flip it enough times; from physics, to whatever degree of measurement accuracy you can afford and is possible within the limits of quantum mechanics (and to the extent that you believe physics).

One has to be careful about what one really is asking when one tags the real world with simple prepositional phrases. The world is not a good model of prepositional logic. (What is a "coin", anyway?)

I think Wikipedia is off-target here also. "No human lives forever" is a perfectly interpretable phrase and on the basis of evidence we can assign a truth value to it (i.e. "true") with a degree of accuracy that approaches the accuracy with which we can answer any question. That it is not strictly falsifiable should not be terribly worrying, since even things that are supposedly strictly falsifiable ("this wall is solid") are subject to all sorts of problems including whether one can adequately define the meaning of the words, perceptual illusions, incorporation of universal properties in the definition ("X is solid if and only if for all Y such that (whatever), Y cannot pass through X") that require infinite testing etc. etc.. All this means as a practical matter is that you shouldn't utterly reject any claim, regardless of how implausible, if it has really good evidence for it.


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