Not to get serious in quote bleet of a meme, but I do think the best approach for positivists is to embrace a normative/imperatival verification principle (which thus escapes the need for verification) - ThreadSky

jsthrill.modphi.com • 83 days ago

Not to get serious in quote bleet of a meme, but I do think the best approach for positivists is to embrace a normative/imperatival verification principle (which thus escapes the need for verification)

Reposted from Bennett McNulty

Comments

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

In general if you want me to solve problems for your philosophical programme let me know I am happy to do so

jandrews2.bsky.social•83 days ago

What would be the command exactly? "Accept as meaningful only what can be verified"?

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

That’s the rough gist; strictly speaking, you want to be more careful since “meaningful” can encompass things like questions and commands, but maybe something like “treat declaratives as meaningful only if their verification conditions are understood”?

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

You could probably generalize this to a version that does encompass other categories of utterance and then the verification principle would be a sub-command of the general instruction to treat sentences as meaningful only insofar as the conditions of their satisfaction are known and coherent?

mbmcnulty.bsky.social•83 days ago

Well then you have the trouble of trying to describe the meaning of a normative/imperative statement in logical empiricist terms. 😬😬😬

(Interestingly, Rose Rand has a paper on the meaning of imperatives, though she assimilates them into a (liberalized) verificationist theory.)

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

I mean, trad view is emotivist, right, you are just cheering for the satisfaction of the command, but there are obviously more sophisticated variants one could go for

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

To my mind, the key idea is that if you look at Hume’s fork, which is what we are basically updating with verificationism, normative stuff doesn’t fit into the fork because it’s not objects of understanding, but objects of will/passions, so it’s a natural move to do here, for behavior guiding props

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

So the details of how you cash out the normative stuff could go lots of ways but the key maneuver is that this isn’t a principle expressing a truth about the world, but practical guidance being endorsed for conducting inquiry/science/communication

jsthrill.modphi.com•83 days ago

And I guess they could go like Cornell realist about the normative stuff instead of emotivist/expressivist but in that case they have an empiricist friendly answer to the original question (or a commitment to having one, at any rate)

mbmcnulty.bsky.social•83 days ago

That said, I think something in the ballpark is a legit positivist response to the criticism, like Carnap's suggestion that the principle is a "proposal," or Schlick's description of philosophy (& its logical analysis of science) as an "activity."

windust.bsky.social•83 days ago

MARVELLOUS! YOU CALL THEM BLEETS TOO!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply