Science requires the uniformity of nature

AveI apologize in advance if anything I say is hard to understand, or I make a spelling error. I started school recently, and with that, I have the combined work of one AP class and two honors classes. This forces me to type out what I’m saying in one sitting.Pro made an argument in R1 to affirm the resolution. One of the premises of this argument was that science is inductive. I outlined a scientific epistemology which makes this premise false. Pro agreed, and dropped the argument in place of a new one. I responded to this new argument by attacking the first premise, which states that predictions require the uniformity of nature. I made two arguments in response to this premise. The first argument is that predictions don’t rely on the uniformity of nature to dismiss claims like ‘’rabbits might be tulips in the future’’. Rather, they rely on the fact that such concerns are unfalsifiable. The second argument states that it’s actually inherent within any hypothesis that the future could be different. It seems that Pro dropped his second argument as well. From what I gather, his new argument is that the implications of falsificationism are too absurd for it to be a sound epistemology. Please keep all of this in mind when you vote on the debate. Pro made an argument, and then he dropped it. Pro made another argument, and then he dropped it. I think this fact alone is sufficient to award Con argument points. I think there some flaws in his new, and third, argument that need to be pointed out. On falsificationism, a hypothesis can always be wrong in the future. The best we can have is high confidence that a hypothesis is true. There is no certainty about the truth of any hypothesis, because we could ‘’always find a brown rabbit’’. For some inexplicable reason, Pro thinks that this entails we can’t have scientific knowledge. There is a missing premise in this argument that Pro hasn’t justified. Why should we think that scientific knowledge is impossible because nature could be different in the future? Scientific knowledge is just the hypotheses (plural of hypothesis, as I learned today) that we have a high amount of confidence in. Having knowledge does not require you to have certainty that your knowledge is true. It only means that your hypothesis is always confirmed and never falsified. Pro says that axiomatizing your hypothesis depends on the uniformity of nature. If you pay close attention to his argument, you’ll notice that this is, for all practical purposes, the same exact argument Pro gave in his last round, but with different words. I already explained why these statements don’t assume the uniformity of nature. Scientists don’t say that rabbits are white and color exists because nature is uniform, but because the hypothesis that color won’t exist tomorrow or that rabbits will be some new color is unfalsifiable. I gave a very lengthy explanation of this using uniformitarianism as an example. (Please feel free to skip the italics. I just put it there for reference.) “Consider the principle of uniformitarianism. This is the geological principle which states that geological processes happening now also happened for the Earth's entire history. If nature is not uniform, then how can this principle be true? It's possible that the half-life of carbon isotopes was different in the past! The principle is not true because the uniformity of nature is true. We have high confidence in the principle because of Popper's principle of falsifiability. Remember, Popper said that a good hypothesis has to be falsifiable. There has to be some experiment that can be done to demonstrate the hypothesis as true. The hypothesis which says 'Geological processes might have been different in the past' is unfalsifiable. I can't go two billion years into the past and see if Potassium-Argon dating still works like it does today. Geologists shouldn't reject the idea that geological processes were different in the past because nature is uniform, but because the hypothesis is fundamentally bad, as it cannot be falsified. I think the same line of reasoning applies to concerns Pro brought up like 'maybe rabbits will be tulips tomorrow' and 'maybe our brains will be different'. Scientists don't ignore these concerns because nature is uniform. Like our geologists, they ignore it because it violates the principle of falsifiability. Predictions don't rely on the uniformity of nature to make them coherent. They rely on the fact that wild concerns are unfalsifiable by their very nature.” To my surprise, Pro insists that hypotheses like ‘’color won’t exist tomorrow’’ are falsifiable! This claim doesn’t make any sense. Falsifiability is the property of being able to be disproved. There is no way to disprove the claim that color won’t exist tomorrow. I can’t even begin to think of an experiment that would disprove that. It’s about as falsifiable as saying ‘’I’m really a one hundred foot giant, but I appear to you as six feet tall’’. Pro portrays falsificationism as saying that we always need to check our hypothesis, and that we can never have any confidence that they’re true: ‘’if nature is not uniform, science should start over every day, even if it just so happens not to change. My opponent doesn't realize that anytime falsificationism does not start over, it is presupposing nature is uniform and there is no need to start over. Every theory must be retested moment to moment. Of course, that doesn't happen.” I think this is an extremely inaccurate portrayal of falsificationism. It ignores the Bayesian and probabilistic nature of falsificationism. Falsificationism allows you have to have high confidence that a hypothesis is true. The more something is confirmed and never falsified, the more confidence you have. This also increases the amount of evidence you would need to rationally discard the hypothesis. There is a relationship between past experiments which confirm a hypothesis and expectations of falsificationism in the future. Pro says some things about how scientists and I, despite our academic insistence on falsificationism, will still keep assuming the uniformity of nature anyways. Of course, this is all just speculation and opinion, so I feel safe in ignoring it. The winner of the debate should be the person with a preponderance of the evidence. Pro has dropped two out of three of his arguments, and the third one has serious flaws. This is why the preponderance of the evidence flows towards Con. Thanks to Pro for taking part in this debate. I learned a lot about scientific epistemology, because accepting this debate forced me to research falsificationism. I appreciate that Pro didn’t forfeit or concede the whole debate. He presented a reasonable case, but unfortunately, it can’t stand up to criticism. I look forward to debating him again one day. Vale