On a deductive level, verificationism is self-defeating; if it’s true then it’s meaningless. On an inductive level, I’ve found it to be a good rule of thumb for determining which controversies are likely to be resolvable and which are likely to go nowhere.
Verificationism is an account of meaning, not a belief in and of itself. It’s not self-defeating.
Regardless, my form is restricted to denying that statements of the sort “an external reality exists/doesn’t exist” are meaningful—none of the claims I’ve made are of that sort, so they’re not meaningless on my terms.
What verification means is that some statements are meaningless because they do not constrain expected experience. You have clearly subscribed to that view in the past .
That verification principle is indeed self defeating ,which is why historically, verificationists adopted analytical truth as a separate category that could be used to justify the verification procedure . You have implicitly done that yourself, where you argued that it was true by definition.
If your claim is now that claims about the external world are meaningless for some reason other than the verification principle...well, what is it.
What verification means is that some statements are meaningless because they do not constrain expected experience
Which statements? My claim is that beliefs are meaningless insofar as they don’t constrain expectations, with a carve out for mathematical claims. Alternatively, we can restrict the set to only beliefs about external reality that are declared meaningless. Either way, verificationism isn’t considered meaningless.
If there’s a version of the verificationism principle that was historically shown to be self defeating, I don’t see how it’s relevant to mine. I looked up the various critiques, and they’re addressing claims I never made.
My version of the verification principle is explicitly about ontological claims. And that principle is not itself an ontological claim.
I don’t really like the way the verification principle is phrased. I’m referencing it because I don’t want to coin a new name for what is definitely a verificationist worldview with minor caveats.
Ok, so you’re only applying the verification principle to ontological claims. That is quite a bit crisper than what you wrote before. On the other hand, the verification principle does feel like an ontological claim as it is claiming that certain things don’t exist or at least that talking about them is meaningless. But how are you defining ontological?
I do have the disclaimer in the middle of OP, but not upfront, to be fair.
>the verification principle does feel like an ontological claim as it is claiming that certain things don’t exist or at least that talking about them is meaningless
These are very different things.
>how are you defining ontological
Claims of the sort “X exists” or synonyms like “X is real”, when intended in a deeper sense than more colloquial usage (e.g. “my love for you is real” is not asserting an ontological claim, it’s just expressing an emotion, “the stuff you see in the movies isn’t real” is also not an ontological usage, “the tree in the forest exists even when nobody’s looking at it” is an ontological claim, as well as “the past really happened”. )
(Note that I view “the tree in the forest exists when people are looking at it” as just as meaningless—all there is is the experience of viewing a tree. Our models contain trees, but that’s a claim about the territory, not the model.)
“Beliefs are meaningless unless they constrain expectations” and “beliefs are meaningless if they are about ontology” don’t mean the same thing. The verificationist principle isn’t about ontology, on the one hand, but still doesn’t constrain expectations, on the other.
I only apply my principle to ontological statements, as explained in OP. And ontological statements never constrain expectations. So they are equivalent under these conditions.
But you shouldn’t apply your beliefs to ontological statements . If the problem with ontological statements is that they don’t constrain beliefs, it’s unreasonable to except other statements that don’t constrain beliefs.
My problem with ontological statements is they don’t appear to be meaningful.
Don’t confuse the historical verification principle with the reasons for believing it. Those reasons apply to ontological statements and not to other statements.
My problem with ontological statements is they don’t appear to be meaningful.
You certainly started by making a direct appeal to your own intuition. Such an argument can be refuted by intuiting differently.
Those reasons apply to ontological statements and not to other statements.
You don’t have any systematic argument to that effect. Other verificationist s might, but you don’t.
There’s a tradition of justifying the verification principle as an analytical truth, for instance. Your rr invention of verificationism is worse than the original .
You certainly started by making a direct appeal to your own intuition. Such an argument can be refuted by intuiting differently.
I’ve made a number of different arguments. You can respond by taking ontological terms as primitive, but as I’ve argued there’s strong reasons for rejecting that.
You don’t have any systematic argument to that effect
Of course I do. Every one of the arguments I’ve put forward clearly applies only to the kinds of ontological statements I’m talking about. If an argument I believed was broader, then I’d believe a broader class of statements was meaningless. If you disagree, which specific argument of mine (not conclusion) doesn’t?
I’m not interested in analytical definitions right now. That’s how Quine argued against it and I don’t care about that construction.
You can respond by taking ontological terms as primitive,
That’s not what I said. I said that you made a claim based on nothing but intuition, and that a contrary claim based on nothing but intuition is neither better nor worse than it.
Every one of the arguments I’ve put forward clearly applies only to the kinds of ontological statements
The argument that if it has no observable consequences, it is meaningless does not apply to only ontological statements.
> said that you made a claim based on nothing but intuition
This isn’t true—I’ve made numerous arguments for this claim not purely based on intuition.
>The argument that if it has no observable consequences, it is meaningless does not apply to only ontological statements.
I did not make this argument. This is a conclusion that’s argued for, not an argument, and the arguments for this conclusion only apply to ontological statements.
This isn’t true—I’ve made numerous arguments for this claim not purely based on intuition.
I didn’t say that the only argument you made was based on intuition. I said that you made an a argument based on intuition, ie. one of your arguments was.
the arguments for this conclusion only apply to ontological statements.
Why? Because your intuition doesn’t tell you that an undecidable statement is meaningless unless it is ontological?
Well, maybe it doesn’t , after all anyone can intuit any thing. That’s the problem with intuition.
The early verificationist had a different problem: they argued for the meaninglessness of metaphysical statements systematically , but ran into trouble when the verificationist principle turned out be meaningless in its own terms.
Why? Because your intuition doesn’t tell you that an undecidable statement is meaningless unless it is ontological?
No, because the specific arguments only work for ontological statements. E.g. the multiverse argument only works for the subset of ontological claims that are true in only some worlds.
My problem with ontological statements is they don’t appear to be meaningful.
Don’t confuse the historical verification principle with the reasons for believing it. Those reasons apply to ontological statements and not to other statements.
Yeah, I don’t know. Don’t take this as a moderator warning (yet), but usually when discussions reach the “one-sentence accusation of fallacy” stage it’s usually best to disengage. I haven’t had time to read this whole thread to figure out exactly what happened, but I don’t want either of you to waste a ton of time in unproductive discussion.
I’m not quite sure what you’re going for with the distinction between an “account of meaning” and a “belief”. It seems likely to cause problems elsewhere; language conveys meanings through socially-constructed, locally-verifiable means. A toddler learns from empirical experience what word to use to refer to a cat, but the word might be “kitty” or “gato” or “neko” depending on where the kid lives.
In practice, I suspect it more or less works out like my “inductive rule of thumb”.
On a deductive level, verificationism is self-defeating; if it’s true then it’s meaningless. On an inductive level, I’ve found it to be a good rule of thumb for determining which controversies are likely to be resolvable and which are likely to go nowhere.
Verificationism is an account of meaning, not a belief in and of itself. It’s not self-defeating.
Regardless, my form is restricted to denying that statements of the sort “an external reality exists/doesn’t exist” are meaningful—none of the claims I’ve made are of that sort, so they’re not meaningless on my terms.
What verification means is that some statements are meaningless because they do not constrain expected experience. You have clearly subscribed to that view in the past .
That verification principle is indeed self defeating ,which is why historically, verificationists adopted analytical truth as a separate category that could be used to justify the verification procedure . You have implicitly done that yourself, where you argued that it was true by definition.
If your claim is now that claims about the external world are meaningless for some reason other than the verification principle...well, what is it.
Which statements? My claim is that beliefs are meaningless insofar as they don’t constrain expectations, with a carve out for mathematical claims. Alternatively, we can restrict the set to only beliefs about external reality that are declared meaningless. Either way, verificationism isn’t considered meaningless.
If there’s a version of the verificationism principle that was historically shown to be self defeating, I don’t see how it’s relevant to mine. I looked up the various critiques, and they’re addressing claims I never made.
Excluding the verification principle from itself feels like a dodge me. I don’t think labelling it as not a belief gets you anywhere.
My version of the verification principle is explicitly about ontological claims. And that principle is not itself an ontological claim.
I don’t really like the way the verification principle is phrased. I’m referencing it because I don’t want to coin a new name for what is definitely a verificationist worldview with minor caveats.
Ok, so you’re only applying the verification principle to ontological claims. That is quite a bit crisper than what you wrote before. On the other hand, the verification principle does feel like an ontological claim as it is claiming that certain things don’t exist or at least that talking about them is meaningless. But how are you defining ontological?
I do have the disclaimer in the middle of OP, but not upfront, to be fair.
>the verification principle does feel like an ontological claim as it is claiming that certain things don’t exist or at least that talking about them is meaningless
These are very different things.
>how are you defining ontological
Claims of the sort “X exists” or synonyms like “X is real”, when intended in a deeper sense than more colloquial usage (e.g. “my love for you is real” is not asserting an ontological claim, it’s just expressing an emotion, “the stuff you see in the movies isn’t real” is also not an ontological usage, “the tree in the forest exists even when nobody’s looking at it” is an ontological claim, as well as “the past really happened”. )
(Note that I view “the tree in the forest exists when people are looking at it” as just as meaningless—all there is is the experience of viewing a tree. Our models contain trees, but that’s a claim about the territory, not the model.)
“Beliefs are meaningless unless they constrain expectations” and “beliefs are meaningless if they are about ontology” don’t mean the same thing. The verificationist principle isn’t about ontology, on the one hand, but still doesn’t constrain expectations, on the other.
I only apply my principle to ontological statements, as explained in OP. And ontological statements never constrain expectations. So they are equivalent under these conditions.
But you shouldn’t apply your beliefs to ontological statements . If the problem with ontological statements is that they don’t constrain beliefs, it’s unreasonable to except other statements that don’t constrain beliefs.
My problem with ontological statements is they don’t appear to be meaningful.
Don’t confuse the historical verification principle with the reasons for believing it. Those reasons apply to ontological statements and not to other statements.
You certainly started by making a direct appeal to your own intuition. Such an argument can be refuted by intuiting differently.
You don’t have any systematic argument to that effect. Other verificationist s might, but you don’t.
There’s a tradition of justifying the verification principle as an analytical truth, for instance. Your rr invention of verificationism is worse than the original .
I’ve made a number of different arguments. You can respond by taking ontological terms as primitive, but as I’ve argued there’s strong reasons for rejecting that.
Of course I do. Every one of the arguments I’ve put forward clearly applies only to the kinds of ontological statements I’m talking about. If an argument I believed was broader, then I’d believe a broader class of statements was meaningless. If you disagree, which specific argument of mine (not conclusion) doesn’t?
I’m not interested in analytical definitions right now. That’s how Quine argued against it and I don’t care about that construction.
That’s not what I said. I said that you made a claim based on nothing but intuition, and that a contrary claim based on nothing but intuition is neither better nor worse than it.
The argument that if it has no observable consequences, it is meaningless does not apply to only ontological statements.
> said that you made a claim based on nothing but intuition
This isn’t true—I’ve made numerous arguments for this claim not purely based on intuition.
>The argument that if it has no observable consequences, it is meaningless does not apply to only ontological statements.
I did not make this argument. This is a conclusion that’s argued for, not an argument, and the arguments for this conclusion only apply to ontological statements.
I didn’t say that the only argument you made was based on intuition. I said that you made an a argument based on intuition, ie. one of your arguments was.
Why? Because your intuition doesn’t tell you that an undecidable statement is meaningless unless it is ontological?
Well, maybe it doesn’t , after all anyone can intuit any thing. That’s the problem with intuition.
The early verificationist had a different problem: they argued for the meaninglessness of metaphysical statements systematically , but ran into trouble when the verificationist principle turned out be meaningless in its own terms.
No, because the specific arguments only work for ontological statements. E.g. the multiverse argument only works for the subset of ontological claims that are true in only some worlds.
The multiverse argument is
Ontological propositions are unverifiable
Unverifiable propositions are meaningless.
2 would apply to any unverifiable statement.
No, I never took 1 or 2 as a premise. Read it again.
My problem with ontological statements is they don’t appear to be meaningful.
Don’t confuse the historical verification principle with the reasons for believing it. Those reasons apply to ontological statements and not to other statements.
“appear to be”
Yes, in many ways, with extended arguments. What exactly is your issue?
Appeal to personal intuition.
Yeah, I don’t know. Don’t take this as a moderator warning (yet), but usually when discussions reach the “one-sentence accusation of fallacy” stage it’s usually best to disengage. I haven’t had time to read this whole thread to figure out exactly what happened, but I don’t want either of you to waste a ton of time in unproductive discussion.
I don’t believe I’ve done that.
I’m not quite sure what you’re going for with the distinction between an “account of meaning” and a “belief”. It seems likely to cause problems elsewhere; language conveys meanings through socially-constructed, locally-verifiable means. A toddler learns from empirical experience what word to use to refer to a cat, but the word might be “kitty” or “gato” or “neko” depending on where the kid lives.
In practice, I suspect it more or less works out like my “inductive rule of thumb”.