Are you saying that all meaningful things are descriptions? — creativesoul
It means other animals can perceive things we can't. It means X-Rays can pass through solid objects. It means a beam of photons can produce either a wave or particle pattern depending on whether you detect which slit they go through. And so on. — Marchesk
Is that not verificationism? — Marchesk
Are you saying that all meaningful things are descriptions?
— creativesoul
Meaningful statements describe the world in some way – that is the purported aim of metaphysical statements. They distinguish, if you like, between ways the world might be. If no such distinction is made, then the statement cannot 'pick out' any way the world might be, and so its being true or false could not possibly hinge on the world being some way. Hence it cannot describe anything. — Snakes Alive
In other words, there is a recognition that since one can speak however one pleases, that one can in some sense 'make true' whatever one pleases, just by talking about it. But as we saw in the second layer, this has no descriptive effect, and cannot really change the world or even what one thinks about it. Yet making a sentence like 'time is unreal' true according to one's logic, which follows from the employment of words in a certain way, one can sort of blur the eyes and almost believe he has stopped time. — Snakes Alive
An idealist can simply accept all that is so, and say those things' truth is to be cashed out in terms of their experiential effects. Indeed, you cannot possibly find a difference, since an idealist can always in principle make this move. — Snakes Alive
And idealist can make this move for experience, but that differs significantly from the move the materialist is making. Let's take the double slit experiment. What does the idealist say? We have two different kinds of experiences depending on how the experiment is setup. What does the materialist say? Well, they come up with things like pilot waves and multiverses. — Marchesk
It doesn't necessarily have to do with the means of verification – it does mean that one has to be able to know what it is, in some way, for the statement to be true as opposed to false. If you don't know that, then you can't tell what makes the sentence true or false, so the statement can't be cognitively meaningful to you. No verification is actually required, even in principle – you could simply describe or imagine something, or read them in a novel, showing the difference, so you could, say, tell in a trial at better than chance level which of the affairs holds in that description. — Snakes Alive
But the point is that those additional posits can also be cast in either framework. You will never find a substantive difference between the two. — Snakes Alive
What is the difference between there being universals and there not being universals? — Snakes Alive
Anyway, this is turning into a tired defense of basic positivism, rather than focusing on the Lazerowitz model, which I'm interested in. These discussions have all been had a million times before. — Snakes Alive
Cognitively meaningful ones, yes – ones that attempt to tell us 'how the world is.' Of course 'meaningful' can mean lots of other things, too, but we're interested here in figuring out 'how things are.' And that is what metaphysics purports to do. — Snakes Alive
Fair enough. But that's a fundamental problem, isn't it? We can't even agree on what makes a statement meaningful. I don't know what that means for philosophy and whether we have to nail down a theory of meaning first before having these debates. — Marchesk
I think philosophy should be studied externally, by anthropologists, and that meaning should be studied by linguistic semanticists. — Snakes Alive
Why would we ever think we could figure out the basic nature of the elements of the universe by talking? It's in this puzzling feature of metaphysics – that somehow the deepest truths are known without any investigation whatsoever, and just by deciding to use words in a certain way, that is the start of his account. — Snakes Alive
I don't know what that means for philosophy and whether we have to nail down a theory of meaning first before having these debates. — Marchesk
Assuming they can stay free of philosophical assumptions. — Marchesk
So basically your criticism is, metaphysics is empty because it’s not physics. — Wayfarer
Because I don't know what it means. — Snakes Alive
Whether a claim is meaningful to someone depends on whether they can understand it, yes. I can't speak to your mind, but I doubt you understand it either. — Snakes Alive
Whether a claim is meaningful to someone depends on whether they can understand it, yes. — Snakes Alive
Demonstrate you understand them using the novel-writing test. — Snakes Alive
Are you actually doubting that I understand my own claim?
— creativesoul
Yes. — Snakes Alive
Why isn't demonstrating that one understands an argument for or against enough? — Marchesk
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