That is what I was talking about before as ‘solar system’ merely being the shorthand for the collection of several planets and stars.
The point is that you cannot view an entity called ‘the solar system.’ It is an abstraction.You can view Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars etc etc which when caballed together becomes the short hand term called ‘solar system.’ Positivism is all about the viewable either directly or indirectly. So by saying that is there is a chair in the solar system you are either saying ‘Amongst the cabal of planets that are loosely termed the solar system, there is a chair’ or the statement is meaningless to the degree that it calls upon trying to view an abstraction which it itself is not observable.
The solar system is no more or less an abstraction than Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. After all, we can view, in a single telescope shot, whole star systems no less than we can view planets closer to home. All observation is theory-laden, i.e. is an interpretation. It has all been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error: evolution, tradition, science. The logical positivist who denies this ends up a solipsist, since it begins with the solar system, moves onto the planets, and soon they don’t know whether their friends and familty really exist–we can no more observe the entire lives of our best friends than we can observe the entire solar system.
Here is the difference. Can you observe ‘the solar system’? Can you observe Venus?
Again, we’re discussing things that are observable. You can observe friends and family. I don’t know of any positivist who thinks that the exist of a person depends on whether you are viewing them at every specific moment thus making it such a theory that if a person were to walk into the next room then they would cease to exist.
I’m grateful to Lee Kelly for his interesting criticism and hope I may be allowed to reply at this late date, as I have only now seen his post.
Mr. Kelly notes, following Popper, that there are verifiable statements the negations of which are not verifiable. “There is a black swan” is verifable, but “No black swans exist” is not, at least on some accounts of verification. No matter how long a black swan has failed to turn up, this does not prove that no black swan exists. (I ought to say that this conclusion seems to me to depend on a constricted view of verification, but let this pass.)If one takes this point just as its stands, the logical positivist criterion of empirical meaning at once collapses. Surely no one would wish to claim that the statement “no black swans exist” is meaningless, however unverifiable it may be. In fact, the positivists did not want to say that such statements were meaningless; and it is only by proceeding as if they were verifiable that the positivist criterion can get off the ground. Otherwise, it eliminates many obviously meaningful statements. In a passage Mr. Kelly is kind enough to quote, I suggested that if a statement is verifiable, its negation is also verfiable. It would have been much better had I made explicit that the negation should be taken as verifiable, in the context of the positivist criterion of meaning.
Mr. Kelly seems to me entirely mistaken when he says “A verificationist, meanwhile, would maintain that only premises that have actually been verified (not those that are merely verifiable) are eligible.” That isn’t in fact the line verificationists took; when they responded to the argument I offered, which is by no means original with me but quite standard in the literature, they tried to come up with more complicated versions of the criterion that would avoid the problem. To confine meaningful stements to those actually verified would be absurdly to narrow the realm of meaningful statements.
Popper did not propose falsifiablity as a criterion of meaning; and the remarks I offered about falsifiablity apply only if, contrary to Popper, one did attempt to use falsifiablity for this purpose. Once more, it is only that a statement and its negation should be taken as meaningful, in the context of a criterion of meaning. In any case, his demolition of me leaves me unmoved. Mr. Kelly,is a devout Popperian and accordingly believes that Popper, following Hume, has uncovered a crucial flaw in induction. I do not accept this; and I find no problem in taking universal propositions to be verifiable. One has only to abandon the constricted view that confines verification to universal enumeration. I also do not think that positivists such as Carnap and Reichenbach who worked on inductive logic had as their principal. aim to refute Popper. To the contrary, they dismissed his views on the topic as eccentric.
I am happy to agree with Mr. Kelly that Austrian economics deserves better defenders than me.
I had forgotten about this thread. In retrospect, my original post was too harsh and partly mistaken. I thank you for your thoughtful response. I even appreciate the “devout Popperian” jab, since it informs me of how I may be misunderstood. I agree with Popper more than most, that is true, and I am often frustrated with how his views are misrepresented. Perhaps this frustration is sometimes mistaken for devotion.
In any case, on the assumption that a statement and its negation must be verifiable for it to be meaningful, then we get the result you describe. Logical positivists assumed that meaningfulness would, like truth, be transmitted from premises to conclusion, and they were wrong. My incorrect interpretation arose from confusing the set of meaningful statements with its subset of statements that logical positivists accept as knowledge. Certainly, those who do propose falsifiability as an alternaitve criterion of meaning (Popper not being one of them) do fall into the same problem that you describe.