Claim
3/29/2008.
A claim is an assertion that something will come out 1 way and not another way. That very thing claimed can itself be a test. There is no such thing as a claim that cannot be tested.
A claim is not "unprovable" just because there is some conceivable way it could be false even in light of all the evidence. If this were true, all claims would be unprovable. After all, it's conceivable that we simply imagined all the evidence in support of the claim.
A person who claims an unverifiable statement can't possibly have any reason to believe that statement himself. So his claim that it is so should have no weight whatsoever with a rational person. You should not believe the claims of others if they cannot justify them.
There's a huge difference between accepting someone else's claims that he performed a certain experiment and got a certain result and accepting someone else's claims even though you know they cannot justify the claims, have performed no verification, and don't even claim verification is possible.
A claim is "verifiable" if there is some imaginable verification process 1 could actually perform. There can never be sufficient supporting evidence for a claim that is not verifiable. The verification process generates supporting evidence. Any process that generates supporting evidence is a verification.
Imagine if we had some claim that was truly not verifiable. That would mean that no conceivable experiment or action would be affected by its truth or falsity. In other words, that would mean there's no difference whether it's true or false. Or, to put it another way, it isn't saying anything.