Alright, so you’re saying that the word “kick” is defined in such a way that it implies affect. In other words “To kick a ball is by definition to affect the ball.” I am not really sure about that, but instead of discussing what that word means, let me provide a different example. When we decide to kick a ball, what happens immediately before we do so? We move to a position close to it and we do so at certain speed. These terms clearly do not imply that the ball will be affected. So in order to determine whether moving close to a ball at certain speed will affect it or not, we have to look at more than just language.
Here’s another example. Instead of kicking a ball and asking ourselves “Did we affect that ball?”, let’s press a light switch and ask ourself “Did we affect the light bulb?” Here, it is pretty clear that the statement “Press the light switch” does not imply an affect upon the light bulb. At best, it implies an affect upon the light switch. This means the question cannot be resolved through the analysis of definitions. Instead, one has to look at something other than language.
In the general sense, “falsifiable” simply means “it can be proven false”. 2+2=4 can be proven false. It’s either true or false and we can discover which one is the case by looking at the definitions of the terms involved. It’s certainly not arbitrarily true. The same applies to every other statement about language. Any statement that says that some portion of the world is such and such is either true or false, and thus, can be either proven to be true or proven to be false. But before we can test a statement, we have to understand what it means. If we can’t do that, we can’t test it. Many statements that are deemed unfalsifiable are deemed so because they either have no meaning or they are not properly understood by those trying to evaluate their veracity.
What exactly do you mean by “the truth of affect”? I understand what it means to prove that affect exists and I also understand what it means to prove that a thing that has no affect exists. Is that what you’re asking?
Affect is merely an act of one thing causing change in another thing. You can prove or disprove that such things exist.
Value is merely a measure of how useful something is to someone. Any given thing is either useful to someone or it is not. For any given thing, you can prove or disprove that it is of value to someone. You can also prove or disprove the idea that valuable things (i.e. things that are of value to at least one person in the world) exist. (I am not sure this is how FC is using the word though. There’s a possibility he’s using it figuratively.)
Information is a portion of reality that represents someone’s knowledge and that has the potential to inform other people. Any given portion of reality is either information or it is not. You can prove it or disprove it. (I am, however, not sure this is how information theorists and modern physicists use the term.)
All three words can be used to describe (and they often are used to describe) what is out there.
The peculiar thing about “value” and “information” is that they are not terms that describe things in terms of how they affect our senses (e.g. how we see them) or how they influence the position and motion of other objects in space. I would say that’s the reason they are not a good fit for physics. Albeit I still don’t know what FC means by “value” and what physicists mean by “information” (my vague guess is that they use that word more in the sense of “sign”, kind of like how Charles Sanders Peirce, the original pansemiotician, used it.)
