Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190716003715

So, many of you might have noticed that I haven't made any new theories yet. That's because I haven't made enough of a discovery to make one.

Mini-Theory 3 actually had a flaw within it... I'm much better at debunking theories than actually making one.

But as I went through the theories... It seems that not everyone agrees on the methodology used when theorizing in the first place. This is often a source of disagreement. Which is why I'm presenting a way to analyze the game logically and scientificially. These are the methods I use when making my analysis.

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At its most fundamental level, canon is what we observe while playing the game. Canon is everything that defines the universe of Undertale on its own. Everything that is strictly canon, we can (and should) claim is automatically true as a premise. This will provide a foundation that we can later build upon to form conclusions out of.

But there is more to it than that... For instance, it's pretty common consensus that Entry 17 is canon.. And a part of said entry being used on the Deltarune website in 2015 (look in the Wayback Machine) makes a pretty strong case that this entry is indeed canon.

Likewise, not everything we observe in the game can be considered canon either. For instance, we observe a glitched introduction when Flowey takes over, and a Floweytale title screen. This would imply that the game is canonically a game, Flowey knows about it... And that hacking is canonically possible.

However, if hacking is canonically possible, we can hack ourselves, can't we? A Dirty Hacker Ending exists, where Sans tells us off for hacking, meaning he is aware of the possibility...

...Yet he makes no use of this knolwedge in the Megalovania fight, and he didn't even seem to know who the anomaly was, or even that there were two (Frisk and Flowey). We have a contradiction.

A contradiction arises when the same claim is shown to be both true and false at the same time. If you run into one... You messed up somewhere. And as we haven't used any fallacious reasoning (if I did, point it out after you've gone over what fallacies actually are.. Yes, I'll be going over logical fallacies in later parts), the only place we could have messed up is by assigning the Dirty Hacker Ending as canon, when it is in fact non-canon.

So, then, how can we possibly tell what is canon, and what is not? The common-sense approach has clearly been shown to be unreliable, so what else is there? And as canon is the only foundation we can rely on to hold everything else up, this is a very important question! Our only method of gathering knolwedge about Undertale's world is by using canon. If we can't even tell what is canon, and what is not, we won't get anywhere when theorizing!

Perhaps we should compare this with a problem of our own:Our senses. Our senses are the medium that we gather information about our world, just as the game is our medium for gathering information about the canon. And in both cases, they can contain illusory data:Things that appear to be real/canon, but in fact are not.

Seeing this parallel, the answer becomes far easier to grasp:We are simply to use the same methodology that the scientsists have been using:Observation and experimentation.

Historically, we've trusted what our senses told us, until we had good reason to believe otherwise. We used to believe the Earth was flat... But this was tested, and demonstrated to be false by Eratosthene. We used to believe that space and time were absolute... But this was also demonstrated to be false based on the absolute relative speed of light. (Theory of relativity)

So, we gather the laws that we can observe within the game... And then try to find exceptions to them. If we fail to prove a law that we observe seeing within the game.. It's canon.

...But we have to actually observe such a law. Like, for example, the fact that Frisk can move, they have a SOUL, can SAVE/LOAD, etc... Rules that we actually see play out within the game. We can't just make up rules about inverse traits and apply this test to them, because we don't observe inverse traits in the canonical medium-Undertale itself.

So whatever we observe within the game is probably canon, and we should assume that it is canon... Unless it being canon would create problems, in which case, it's not canon. (And it's probably a good idea to actually search for problems. This will be a theme I elaborate on more once I get into science.)

An alternative way to look at canon is this:If an event has been explicitly mentioned by a character within the game.. It represents something real within the game. This is because the character who mentioned it is just aware of this phenonemon as we are-They can't react to an event that they are unaware of:Therefore, it cannot be an illusion specifically for us (though it may be a canonical illusion:We'll talk about Occam's Razor later on).

If the rule is flat-out demonstrated by a character, then the rule must be canon at least in some form... Else it couldn't be demonstrated. But that doesn't mean the rule is true as we see it. The law of gravity has been used and demonstrated to predict orbits, and helped build weighing scales.. Even though it used gravity as a force, which it is not (general relativity). Even still, the law of gravity described something real, and that was used to build these scales. This is what I mean by it existing in some form-It has to exist in some form to be used.. (Or there's some conspiracy going on.. But once again, I'll talk about Occam's Razor later on. For now, let's just discount the conspiracy hypothesis.)

If it is not mentioned or demonstrated at all by anyone, it cannot be said that it refers to anything canonical, and could be an imperfection in the medium used to show us the canon. This is similar to how if you see a ghost... But nobody in the crowd around you sees it... The ghost is probably a hallucination or some kind of illusion (don't worry, a significant portion of the population has "seen" a ghost at some point in their life. This isn't an abnormality.)

If there's disagreement between the results of each method... (That is, we have failed to find a problem with an observed rule being canon, yet the characters react as if the rule isn't a thing) It means we haven't yet determined if it's canon or not. (Do you "react" to the sky being blue? While it could be that the event simply isn't canon, it could be that the rule is canon, but is too ordinary to make note of within the world. So this can't be demonstrated as a problem with considering the rule canon.)

But these foundations alone won't get us that far. It'll only give us the information that most of us can agree to be true.. And won't disprove that many possibilties either. Well, that's because this is just the first tool we have.

We also have logic, science, and a few branches of epistemology to help us out. We'll go over the basics of logic in the next part-Things like premises, conclusions, and deductive reasoning.

When we combine all the tools we have... Then we'll be able to find the most likely truths about Undertale. 