Empirically Verifying the Verification Principle

[tomdbeevers1]

At least that is Carnap's use of the principle.

[tomdbeevers1]

The principle of verification should be interpreted, not as a discovery of the "true" sense of meaning, but as a recommendation or appeal to the desire that allows us to pragmatically predict the world without talking about facts about the world to which we have no manner of ascribing a truth value. For example, it is undeniably pointless to say that there is a hippo in the room but is undetectable to all means of human cognition.

[claudio249347a]

You are all wrong. The principle of verification is a grammatical proposition in Wittgenstein's sense. It says that the cognitive meaning of an empirical sentence is given by the ways we verify it. That is: it is an analytical proposition, although not an obvious one like bachelors are unmarried. Nevertheless, there is a lot of analytical propositions that are not obvious, something that even Locke knew very well!!!

[iamgoddard]

Brilliant!

Calls to mind Hume's philosophical text concluding that any text not on mathematics or scientific experiments should be committed the flames.

[iamgoddard]

... to the flames.

[LaserBlowFish]

@CartesianTheist "won't be bothered to watch it anyway" .. maybe, maybe not, there is so much confusion in this world, so many disputes that revolve around mere semantics, I maintain you should always try not to add more

"being playful" .. well yes, at least he didn't use much more strident terms but still, the arguments behind the playfulness fail, I've provided evidence for this. It's not even funny to say they are "self professed p-zombies" when they think p-zombies are almost impossible.

[LaserBlowFish]

@CartesianTheist You are entirely correct, except to a layperson this video makes it look like empiricism is the problem and it also does a lot of strawmanning and unjustified ad-hominems against some modern philosophers.

[LaserBlowFish]

@CartesianTheist Right well clearly in the absence of empirical evidence people have been wrong so many times that you can't blame people for coming to that conclusion. Still this video doesn't show the real problem with Empiricism, only makes fun of it, so it doesn't really do much good. As I said at the start, this video makes the assumption that empiricism must be justified in a foundationalist manner but clearly, much of 20th century epistemology is coherentist empiricism instead.

[LooksAeterna]

I don't undertand why you make such a video. Logical positivism is as dead as the deadest cat I've ever seen. No serious philosopher of science today is still a logical positivist in the original sense.

YOU keep these matierialist-religious intellectual goons of the money-fascists alive with your fight against them as if they had serious thinking on their side which they clearly don't. Hardly anyone still gives them attention. They are the intellectual gate-keepers of the money temple.

[JohananRaatz]

@LooksAeterna Well positivism seems to have spontaneously reincarnated itself in today's eliminitivists.

[LaserBlowFish]

@JohananRaatz It only seems that way because there are modern epistemologies which have things in common with positivsm but at the same time have resolved the criticisms put forward against logical positivsm. For example empircism, as long as it's not Empiricism, still makes sense, it's still something desirable if at all possible although it's clearly not ALL of knowledge. When you haven't verified something there could be multiple models which are equally true.

[LaserBlowFish]

It's also worth noting how steeped in irony this is. If you empirically verify this video, it fails :D.

[LaserBlowFish]

And labels are just labels, but the following Wikipedia quote describes Dennett's actual postion:

"Dennett stresses that heterophenomenology does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence."

.. which is exactly what I said .. Stop strawmanning him for Pete's dragon !

[LaserBlowFish]

And about platonic forms, the million dollar question is, how do you actually know that something is platonic rather than a result of something even more fundamental ? All you can do is assert it, use it as a definition, and make a coherent picture, which means you're actually appealing to coherentism rather than foundationalism without knowing it anyway.

[LaserBlowFish]

And I said it before but it seems you didn't get the message, Dennett is NOT a logical positivist. All he is saying is that you shouldn't ASSUME that something cannot be measured empirically. The p-zombie case completely fails because it starts by making the unfounded assumption that such things could exist at all. You can say the words but that doesn't make it possible. It may be the case that consciousness is not measurable / verifiable but we definitely have no grounds at all to give up hope.

[LaserBlowFish]

@LaserBlowFish And just so you don't have to take my word for it: tinyurl DOT com/2d627lc

Dennett is in the same league as Quine et al who reject the tenets of logical positivism as whole, which is not to say they separately don't have any merit if corrected and proper socratic humility is applied to any and all absolute claims.

[LaserBlowFish]

In other words, foundationalism fails, coherentism wins.

[LaserBlowFish]

@LaserBlowFish Well coherentism + model dependent realism.

[LaserBlowFish]

sigh .. look up vicius circle vs virtuous circle on Wikipedia

Yes, empircism can obviously verify itself, thus being circular, but in a demonstrably virtuous manner.

If you don't verify something, if it doesn't fit, it's more easily wrong, and this can be demonstrated by looking at empirical data about cases where empiricism is not applied. q.e.d

[theprodigy2186]

Holy damn Sir! Your videos are getting better and better!! Keep it up! : D

[JohananRaatz]

@theprodigy2186 I've got one coming up that will blow your mind right through the ceiling. (well it won't right away -until people realize what it's actually talking about but that's a different story)

[theprodigy2186]

@JohananRaatz I believe you when you say that! haha, I can't wait!!

[JohananRaatz]

@theprodigy2186 I'll give you the inside scoop actually if you pm me your email. It's about 100 times cooler than what I showed you last time. (I'm not even kidding)

[UncannyRicardo]

OMG dude, talk about intuition or foresight.

I was seriously planning on asking you something about that whole statement of "unfalsifiable hypothesis/questions are meaningless". And I just check your channel and boom, theres a video about it.

So here was my question. Isen't the statement "unfalsifiable claims are meaningless" itself unfalsifiable? And if so that would make it a contradiction right?

[JohananRaatz]

@UncannyRicardo "I was seriously planning on asking you something about that whole statement of "unfalsifiable hypothesis/questions are meaningless". And I just check your channel and boom, theres a video about it."

Synchronicity at work! ;)

"Isen't the statement "unfalsifiable claims are meaningless" itself unfalsifiable? And if so that would make it a contradiction right?"

Yup, that's the whole point of the video.

[UncannyRicardo]

@JohananRaatz

Thanks man. Im serious I came here probubly thinking to send you a pm about this but looks like you beat me to it.

[JohananRaatz]

@UncannyRicardo Funny how that works out. ;)

[BrainiacOutcast]

I haven't laughed this hard in a LONG time. Thanks :D