Ben C said:
Ben C said:
[...] [...]
There are many statements that have turned out to be true that,
while not obviously incomprehensible, were quite unaccompanied by
any known means of testing."
Can you give an example of such a statement?
Think of the history of the atomic theory. If you go back far enough,
statements were made about the material world being made of tiny
invisible things. No one came up with even mildly convincing ways to
test the idea. It was not just a matter of practicalities, it was a
matter of even imagining such tests.
Good example. The next move for the strong verificationist at this point
might be to try to show that atomic theory was analytic, and therefore
not a statement of fact.
Well, I doubt this in this case. What actually happens in these
sorts of cases is that there is a push to give a verificationist
interpretation. In other words, if the meaning is a bit obscure
to a positivist thinker, but he nevertheless sees the potential
or actual scientific advantage or success in the theory, he will
give it an explicit meaning in terms of the means by which it is
to be verified. Or at least, that is his programmatic intention!
A nice example of this and perhaps one more familiar to the
general reader is the attempt by the behaviourists in both
philosophy and psychology to think that statements about the mind
are only truly meaningful when cashed out in terms of actual
behaviour. "He is agitated" is, to be crude, "him pacing up and
down". I use the term "cash out" to hide the very real
complications. They go from the very crude to the very
sophisticated. It is fun to watch a positivist in action, he is
truly acrobatic and though the best of them take a deep breath
when confronted by difficult cases (like examples of inner mental
life that have few if any outward signs), bravely go forth and
have a go. They don't succeed in my opinion, but that is another
matter.
I meant to put the emphasis more on "meaningful". The point is, not
everything meaningful is either true or false at all. I think this is a
different objection to verificationism from the one you are thinking of.
Well, I am not sure what you are saying here. Of course, not
every meaningful string is a claim that can be true or false. But
all such strings can be part of such claims (this is very easy to
demonstrate). And it is precisely when they are part of truth
claims that the positivist's eagle eyed attention is drawn.
[...]
Even statements which have been regarded as refutable by mere
inspection of their meanings, (never mind being dismissed for
lack of evidence or means of verification)
have turned out to be seen to be true by intelligent and knowledgeable
people eventually. But since you have not asked about this, I will
resist going on.
Do you mean paradoxes? I'm sure quite a few people must have thought
special relativity refutable a priori.
No, not paradoxes. I simplify but this might give an idea:
Take, as an example, the old idea of a materialist theory of
mind. Take the form of it that identifies the mind with the
brain. It has been quite a long tradition - until some clever
and persistent Australian philosophers came along about 35 years
ago - to dismiss the idea on the grounds that it makes no sense.
Never mind is it true! The brain, these traditionalists, note,
has weight in pounds and size in inches, has a grey colour and is
pretty slimy when inspected. But these qualities are not even the
sorts of qualities that it makes any sense to attribute to a
mind. Or so it was said. So they dismissed the theory. They just
looked at the meanings!
However, certain distinctions were really quite missed by these
traditionalists. A crucial one was the one between meaning and
reference. Two statements can have quite different meanings in
the words used. But the words used might yet refer to the very
same object.
Specifically, one description might be deemed to refer to
something successfully, another description similarly. The
objects referred to, might, when counted, add up to 2. But they
might also only add up to 1. In the latter case, both
descriptions refer to the very same thing. The meaning does not
depend on the utterer knowing the sum.
Here is an example. I report that I was rudely jostled by a tall
man in a grey coat in a street. You, being unsighted at the time,
report that you were jostled by someone with a bad tempered voice
pushing his way through. The words in the descriptions here are
quite different in meaning. And yet both descriptions, unknown to
us, could easily refer to the same man.
Meaning and reference are not to be confused with each other.
That does not mean there is no connections between the two. But
the difference is quite enough to generate the most wide ranging
set of fascinating cases that can be illustrated in the history
of science, from astronomy (for a long time it was not known that
The Evening Star was the very same as The Morning Star
(Phosphorus and Hesperus were in fact, it later became known, the
one and only Venus) to genetics (think of Mendelian terminology
and concepts and modern genetics) and many other fields.