On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, gordon wrote:

> I do not believe positivism is dead. However that is not really the issue.
> You still have not answered my question, perhaps because I did not phrase it
> correctly.
>
> I am honestly curious to know how someone who rejects positivism can
> distinguish meaningful statements from nonsensical statements.

It's not that you didn't phrase your question correctly.  You
asked a completely different one.  You asked how someone who
rejects positivism (as everyone should) could take evidence
seriously.  Now you are asking how to distinguish meaningful from
meaningless statements, which is something else again.

> Consider the statement "The unicorns on the moon prefer to eat carrots".
>
> I reject that statement as meaningless on positivist grounds. The statement
> cannot be verified because unicorns do not exist on the moon or elsewhere.

You are mistaken.  Even according to positivism this statement is
meaningful, but false.  The verification principle only requires
that we be able to say what observations would, in principle,
verify it.

> The statement has no place in any meaningful discussion of any kind. There
> is no point in debating or testing the truth value of the proposition that
> lunar unicorns prefer carrots, because the statement is utter nonsense.

It's not nonsense.  It's just false.

> Do you also reject it as meaningless? If so then on what grounds?

As you see, I don't reject it as meaningless, because it's
perfectly meaningful.

To call a proposition meaningful is only to say that we know
something about its truth conditions, which means that we know
what would count for or against its being true.  This doesn't
entail that we are in a position to verify it.  Applied to your
test proposition, it's not a problem to say what would count in
favor of the claim that lunar unicorns prefer carrots.  The terms
"count in favor" and "count against" have to be construed
probabilistically.  To say that X counts in favor of (= is
evidence for) P means that P is more likely to be true given X
than given not-X.

If we can conceive of evidence for or against a proposition, it
is meaningful.

Here's one for you.  The famous "Goldbach conjecture" in
mathematics is the proposition that every even number is the sum
of two primes.  Despite the efforts of legions of mathematicians,
it has never been proven true.  Nevertheless, even with the use
of supercomputers no exception to it has ever been found.  Given
Goedel's theorem, we can't even say that it is in principle
provable if it is true.  Should we say then that it is
meaningless?  Hardly.  We know *exactly* what it means, because
we understand its truth conditions at least to the extent that we
know what would count against it.

I apologize for this digression from paleo stuff.

Todd Moody
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