> Newtonian insistence on ensuring that any statement is testable by observation ... undoubtedly cuts out the crap, it also seems to cut out almost everything else as well.

Wow, there's a little thought-grenade for the "that's not falsifiable" crowd...I had to read his source article to really (well, and very basically) appreciate what he was getting at.

I do agree with this idea; once you are that insistent on testable stuff, once you see it as _the_ hammer for every nai...err, problem, you are basically the stubborn hermetic hold-out as far as the broader conceptual space is concerned.

Alder seems to aim more at the social space, but I think it's a bigger problem than his dinner-party-style example would indicate.

It may even be important for people like that to define for themselves how and when the imagination is useful...

(There is also a broader question about sets of psychological tooling which would be pretty fascinating to reconcile with this kind of thought model. I can think of at least a few groups of people who would have a pretty good counter to an argument like this, especially one with a winner-takes-universe feel to it)