Theory of Unverifiable Brownies
This outline states the properties of the
theory, also known as Brownian
Theory, or T.U.B.
Basic Principles
• Completeness: Everything happens because of the
actions of logically unverifiable brownies.
• Uniqueness: Every brownie is unique.
• Inertia: Every brownie continues to do what it is
doing unless acted on by another brownie.
• Action/Reaction: Whatever is done by one brownie is
opposed by another brownie.
• Dominance: In a competition between brownies, the
dominant one always wins.
Some Basic Questions
• How do we know the brownies exist? If there were
no brownies, nothing could happen; therefore, they
must exist.
• Are these like the little chocolate squares we eat?
No, silly.
• Are these little girls who sell cookies? No, silly.
• What do they look like? Well, they cannot be seen,
heard, smelled, tasted, or touched or detected in any
other way, because they are logically unverifiable.
The principle of fringes
• Fringes: The brownies have fringes. When
these become frangulated, it causes illness
that can manifest itself by either mental or
physical symptoms.
• There are some people who say that
brownies have no fringes. But they are
wrong. These are called non-fringists.
Untestable Brownies
• If we look in the corner, we won’t see any,
because they are unverifiable.
• We cannot use a microscope to see them.
• They do not appear in infrared images.
• It is a contradiction to assert that someday
we will have a machine, the brownieometer,
to detect them.
Everything can be
“explained”
• Everything that happens can be explained by the
actions of the unverifiable brownies.
• No matter what happens, we can construct an
analysis in terms of the brownies and what the
dominant ones wanted to do.
• There is nothing that could, in principle, happen that
would disprove the theory. The theory cannot be
falsified; so it must be true, right?
Criticism
• Some people say that this “theory” is not meaningful.
That is, if it cannot be tested and cannot in principle
be refuted, it is not meaningful and does not qualify
as a theory.
• However, that same criticism can be leveled against
other “theories” such as Freud’s psychoanalysis. So, if
one likes psychoanalysis, one should love the
brownies.
• There are many other theories like this one that are
widely believed by people; some are taught in
universities.
Operationism
• Operationism is the philosophical position that the
meaning of an empirical statement is equivalent to
the set of operationally specifiable, testable
implications. If a statement has no implications, then
it has no empirical meaning. “Your brownie is ugly.”
Some people get upset over meaningless statements
such as this one. Similarly, the theory of unverifiable
brownies is a theory that cannot be refuted by doing
experiments or empirical tests.