Theory of Unverifiable Brownies

1. Theory of Unverifiable Brownies This outline states the properties of the theory, also known as Brownian Theory, or T.U.B.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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?

7. 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.

8. 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.