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Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning. For example, the statement that "all true statements can
by squidlogic 10y ago
Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning.
For example, the statement that "all true statements can be determined empirically" is not itself verifiable by empirical means.
- grenoire 10y agoWhat if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically? Is that not the empirical way to determine the truth of that all-inclusive statement?
- dragonwriter 10y ago> What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically? How would you demonstrate that you have done this? Particularly, how would you demonstrate that there is no true statement which you have not empirically demonstrated?
- titzer 10y agoGödel's incompleteness theorem already rules this out for mathematics, so why should we believe it about the universe?
- njohnson41 10y agoFair enough; I'll be a little more precise. I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1 probability)". This statement is itself a tautology, because tautologies are by definition true, and because "determined" implies some method of determination, which if it actually can be used to determine truth, means it can be used empricially. Determination and empiricism are secretly defined in terms of each other, basically. The reason this tautology is worth stating is that it gives a simple criterion for discarding non-questions: questions that have no method of determining whether they are true or false (with arbitrarily high probability), are always non-questions.