#verificationism

[existentialcomicsfeed]

Verificationist Man

[sterwood]

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses *in toto* - without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to *method*. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or 'improve' it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.

Georg Lukacs, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” in History and Class Consciousness

This really changed my view about the seeming staticness of Marxist theory and the ways of engaging with the tradition when I first read it. It also, in a totally separate vein of intellectual thought, is a good rejoinder to verificationism and its deviations in that while science does advance certain propositions that can be potentially falsified, scientific methodology can’t be evaluated in the same way and isn’t subject to falsification. In the same vein, Marxism (whose status as a ‘science’ I am honestly ambivalent about - mostly because I don’t know how to characterize sciences generally, rather than any specific problem concerning Marxism proper), as a method of critical investigation and action given the name ‘dialectical materialism’, isn’t subject to the criterion of falsification, though individual Marxist propositions (like “The state is necessary for keeping the gains of the revolution” or “Fully automated luxury gay space communism is the only proper end-goal of Marxist praxis”) are subject to such. This makes Marxism into a tactic and a lens of sorts, rather than an edifice to prostrate oneself in front of - and also joins it up with Pragmatism in various ways as well.

[space-go]

(Wittgenstein)

Even if you don't assign as much importance to the principle of verification as the logical positivists or at times Wittgenstein did, it still seems to me to be an enormously useful way of thinking about and understanding abstract sentences and claims.

[raglanphd]

#verificationism #coherentism #williamjames #pragmatism

[raglanphd]

“Truth is one species of good, and not, as usually supposed, a category distinct from good and not coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons…If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which if believed in would help us lead to that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other vital benefits.”

[riveretoelkonscio]

The Church of Psychoanalysis’s Foundational Belief, phr. There is no god and Sigmund Freud is his prophet.

Leonard Roy Frank

[reason-and-faith]

Are there Objective Truths about God?

Pilate entered the praetorium again and called Jesus, and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to…

This website is a fantastic resource for those interested in Christian apologetics and this audio file (though long) is well worth the listen. What is an objective truth? What is an absolute truth? What about relativism? Is it rational to believe something if it can’t be empirically verified (empirical verificationism)? On the website it provides an outline for the talk (delivered by Dr. William Lane Craig) in a logical format. Enjoy!

[jadagul]

Well, the insomnia fairies struck, so let’s celebrate with another rambling on my approach to philosophy.

I’d like to thank  polyaletheia for a very helpful series of probing questions last night; I hopefully will sound less confused today.

Also, holy shit this got long, so readmore:

I think one reason I sounded confused is that I let myself get pulled into a framework that I’m trying to reject.  In particular, all the following things are true:

(1) I don’t think it’s meaningful to talk about what’s “really true” or what the “correct standard for truth” is.

(2) I’m more or less verificationist in my approach to life.

(3) Verificationism implies (1).

However, I don’t believe (1) because I’m pseudo-verificationist; instead, I belief (1) and then or therefore am pseudo-verificationist.

I’m not really going to try to defend this right now, but roughly, I start with the idea that “truth” is a property of languages and models; sentences can be true, but facts can’t be true.  (That is, “’Water is wet’ is true” is well-formed, but “The wetness of water is true” is not).  Since I believe propositions exist within language and don’t have independent existence, and that language is a contingent creation of specific minds, there’s no “correct” sense of truth any more than there’s a “correct” definition of “water.”  Or, for that matter, a “correct” word for that clear stuff I drink.  

Okay, I’m happy to talk more about that if anyone wants, but for the rest of this post I’m going to stipulate it.  Then we can’t talk coherently about what the “correct” standard of truth is, it depends on the model we’re using.  (To quote my favorite existentialist novel, which happens to be a random EU Star Wars novel, “everything I tell you is a lie.  The truth is always bigger than the words we use to contain it”).  But while models can be “good” or “bad”, “useful” or “useless,” they aren’t ever “true.” A model that includes everything ceases to be a “model,” and also ceases to be useful. (”The map isn’t the territory” etc)

Now, there are all sorts of self-consistent models, and this is where I drop the joke about the anti-inductive aliens (”How can we believe the anti-inductive principle? Well, it’s never worked before”).  But there appear to be constraints on what sort of models humans are going to accept, and I think a certain amount of verificationism is one of them--that is, I don’t know of any human-endorsed theories of truth that count correct predictions against a statement.  So from our perspective as humans with human-type reasoning systems, all verifiable statements are meaningful, and falsified statements are false.  (Roughly speaking).

But there are a whole bunch of statements that are non-verifiable.  And you can throw those into your model or not as you want.  Like, “God exists in a way undetectable to mortals” is an unverifiable statement.  And it’s not a statement that’s in my model.  But if you want it in your model, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong.  I just don’t find your model very comfortable to work in.

Similarly, to use Rorty’s example, let’s think about Galileo.  Galileo held that the earth “really” revolves around the sun.  And the Catholic Church held that the sun “really” revolves around the earth.  And apparently (as Rorty tells the story, anyway), one of the guys in charge of refuting Galileo wrote that, okay, his observations and calculations were really cool.  And they might be a good computational shortcut for sailors to predict where they should expect to see astronomical objects.  But as we know from the Bible, the sun “really” revolves around the earth.

Now, this position is totally unfalsifiable!  The position is “Everything looks exactly like it would if the earth revolved around the sun, but really the sun revolves around the earth.”  And that’s a perfectly reasonable model that won’t actually cause you any problems, just maybe give you some shitty math.  

In fact, if you really understand relativity--it’s true.  It’s totally true.  You can pick any reference frame you bloody well want, so if you want you can take the one where the earth is stationary.  It just gives you shitty, shitty math if you want to do solar system dynamics.

But if you’re just trying to think about roughly where the sun will be in the sky in a couple hours, it works fine.  I’m not gonna lie, in real life I model the sun as revolving around the earth.  It’s slightly easier for me to picture and works just as well.

Note, this sidesteps the problem ogingat had with verificationism.  (And raises a different set of issues where he tells me “Rorty is just wrong”, but ignore those for the moment).  If you treat verificationism as an answer to the question “what statements are really meaningful,” then it’s self-refuting; the statement “statements are meaningful iff they are verifiable” is unverifiable and thus unmeaningful by its own criterion.  But since I start by stipulating that the question of what statements are “really” meaningful is a dumb question with no good answers that I’m not trying to answer, that’s not a problem for me.  Verificationism isn’t true; it’s a model I find comfortable in a lot of circumstances.  And that’s a verifiable fact.