[spokesman] Hear ye', hear ye'! Your honorable king, sir lord Popper is about to speak!

[Popper] My beloved subjects and underlings, I have come before you today to make a bold conjecture! ...

[Popper] Everyone knows of the venerable glass table up in the tree, higher than which no mortal man shall ever ascend ...

[pauper] My lord, how come there is a glass table that is stuck way high up in the branches of a tree?

[Popper] Silence! One should not ask questions about the nature of what is. One should not speak of that voodoo known as metaphysics. [speedily, and with less intonation] Besides, there was probably a tornado at some point, and someone's glass table was accidentally lifted by wind and lodged way up into the tree. But allow me to carry on, as if tables-lodged-in-trees was a natural and normal occurrence on planet earth!

Thank you, I prefer silence when I speak, which gives one the unearned sense that what one is saying is not, nay, cannot ever, be refuted. Anyhoo, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the conjecture ... the bold conjecture: I have in my hand a coin and I am going to walk over to the Tree of Mystery and I am going to toss the coin up onto the Table of Heights, higher than which no mortal man shall ever ascend. And I hereby say unto thee, that the coin flip will result in "tails."

[pauper] My lord, did it work? Does your conjecture stand, or has it been refuted by experience?

[Popper] I ... I ... cannot say. The damn thing is just too high up there for me to see. Summon the dwarf!

[boy] I'm not a "dwarf," I'm 5 years old. People who are 5 years old just happen to be small and ...

[Popper] Send the dwarf up the Tree of Mystery, to examine the result!

[boy] My lord, I've climbed as far as is possible, even for a little boy ... er ... even for a "dwarf" ... and I can see through the bottom of the glass table, your majesty! I can see the bottom face of the coin!

[Popper] Well, out with it, dwarf! What is it that you see?

[boy] The bottom face of the coin is "heads", my lord.

[Popper] Aha! So my bold conjecture has not "yet" been refuted!

[pauper] My lord, can we not say that ye' ole' conjecture has thus been verified to be true? I mean, if a coin has 2 sides, and if one of them is heads, and if one of them is tails, then is it not true that there is a dichotomous nature in question and ...

[Popper] Silence! What blasphemy dost' thou speaketh?! You cannot speak of a permanent and positive proof of the actual truth of things in the world! All that can ever be certain to humans is the evidence of the senses, which can then be used in order to refute various theories explaining why specific results are observed. Refutations, as permanent as they are, cannot ever lead to verifications!

[pauper] Why not?

[Popper] Because I, your mighty king, have declared it -- at the outset -- to be an impossibility!

[indignant pauper] With all due respect, my king, but what kind of an epistemological dictatorship are you running here?

[Popper] Silence! I will not be moved by the appeal to reason! There shall be no inferential generalization -- to anything not directly perceivable by man -- in my kingdom! And the result of my coin flip is not directly perceivable. We cannot see which side of the coin faces up, we can only see the side that faces down -- and you cannot infer with certainty that which you cannot perceive directly. There is no way for us to truly know the result of that coin flip. Sure, if the bottom face of the coin had been "tails", then we would know that my conjecture had been permanently refuted, but we cannot infer anything beyond that -- such as the actual result of the coin flip.

Inference to that which is not directly perceived -- if performed with the understanding that the inference is necessarily true of the world -- is heresy!