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Have you read Rorty? He basically echoes Language, Truth, and Logic. He’s just not a prat about calling such and such propositions “true” or “false”.
Oh, and we were having a debate on some other thread about the viability of Anarchism. I responded to your post but I don’t believe you ever got back to me. Some people say you’re a troll on these forums. shrug
Is anyone familar with operationalism?
“I think Ayer recanted positivism in later life too.”
He recanted many parts of positivism such as the attempt to reduce all language to that of sense-data. He was also intrigued by many of Quine’s ideas and was convinved that the analytic/synthetic dichotomy which was fundamental to much of his thought was not as clear as he initially supposed.
However, to say that Ayer recanted positivism (in the sense which many on this forum understand the word) is equivelant to the myth of Charles Darwin recanting evolution on his deathbed. He remained an empiricist, a moral non-cognitivist and a proponent of the weak verification principle (which I find superior to Popper’s epistemology and closely mirrors contemporary formalizations such as bayesian/solomonoff induction).
That’s true as far as it goes. But if you define it as 2+2 you then have to prove that 2+2 is the number after 3.
As an example, take the statement “Barack Obama is the current prez.” You can make that a definition, but then you’d have to prove that Barack Obama is the child of Mr and Mrs Obama of Hawaii.
Well, we agree then. All I meant by remains to be proven is that it hasn’t been proven yet.
And I also agree with the last part of your post.
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Isn’t defining 4 as the number after three just saying 3+1=4? Anyway, I’m saying that its consistent to have infinite definitions of 4 so long as they are all equivalent. 4=2+2=3+1=5-1 etc etc.
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Thanks. Was a good convo. Been a long time since i’ve done philosophy. Rusty.
yes it is.
you can’t have infinite definitions. you pick one, then you have to prove all the others are equvalent. Which is why I dont get people saying you can define anything so that its a tautology. If you define it in one way, you then have to prove its the same as the standard way. So you havent shown there is no information just by defining it.
for instance, there is a conjecture that has not been proven or disproven yet, that every even number is the sum of two primes. If I define an even number as the sum of two primes, and that conjecture is false, then my definition wont be the same as the usual one.
so the only way I can define something to make it a tautology is AFTER someone has already defined it another way, and done the hard work of proving it’s the same as my new definition.
same with the white swans example soemone posted. Only after someone has done a lot of reasearch all over the world and proven that all swans are white can I define swans as white birds.
Not really.. you can define a word any way you want. If I define a swan to be a fire breathing demon, then it is tautologically true that all swans breath fire. It is no longer a useful definition, however, as I can no longer say anything meaningful about swans as the word is commonly used. All that is necessary to know is that my special definition has no referent that exists in reality. I cannot equivocate by defining swan in a special way and then attempting to apply the term to your everyday long necked white/black bird, as it would no longer be classified as such under my definition.
There is no ‘correct’ definition in discourse, although the most common definition is usually better if your purpose is to actually communicate knowledge (not always ones purpose in debates, unfortunately). So long as terms are clearly defined beforehand, it doesn’t matter if you use a unique definition.
Have you read Hayek’s Counter-Revolution of Science?
Here:
http://store.mises.org/Counter-Revolution-of-Science-Hardback-P415.aspx
I think it can help.
Rorty is a pragmatist.