Quite, Clark. We have some people who still believe meaning is fully determined and that one can determine truth or falsity thereby. This is a view that does not understand how language works. Peirce recognized that making meanings clear was a process, not an endpoint. This is an endpoint that at present does not exist, and I think there is little reason to think it will exist in the near future. In the meantime we have to keep out options open. To do other is to close down creativity (see my Informal Pragmatics and Linguistic Creativity<http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/Informal%20pragmatics%20and%20Linguistic%20Creativity%20version2.pdf>, South African Journal of Philosophy, 2014 for my most recent statement) and, as I argued in a recent post, just push the problem further back. The article uses Peirce, of course. Best, John
From: Clark Goble [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: April 2, 2015 7:22 PM To: Peirce List Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Article on origin of the universe relevant to some recent discussions on these lists On Apr 2, 2015, at 11:00 AM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: An empirical proposition is falsifiable if a counterexample is logically possible. When we go for a long enough time without observing a counterexample, which may involve creating experimental conditions under which a counterexample should occur, then we begin to believe that there is some natural constraint ruling against it and we act on that belief as if it were true. And it may well be - time will tell. One of Popper's problems was that he did not always distinguish the logical status of an unfalsifiable proposition from the psychological status of a proposition that some people do not wish to disbelieve. Just coming back and *way* behind in posts. But I agree that the problem with logical positivism and in particular Popper's purported refutation was confusing logical status with the more complicated issues. Popper notes that logical positivism treats laws in a logical form like "All X is Y" so a single counter-example refutes it but a slew of positive examples don't confirm it. This seems really insightful until you move from the logical form to the question of doing the reduction to the logical form. Then you find that everything is so theory laden that a falsification is no better than a confirmation. So for instance if you had a measurement that the Newton's law was wrong (ignoring relativity for now) do you say you're refuted Newton or do you assume there's an other body out there or something else you've missed? Quine gets at this. While Quine has his own problems he does avoid a lot of the oversimplifications of the logical positivists or most of their first generation of critics. Honestly I've long thought the Vienna Circle just took a series of missteps by missing several of Peirce's key insights. (To be fair Peirce just wasn't well known and most of pragmatism was seen through the lens of James who tended not to follow Peirce's logic) While the positivists adopt a verification account quite similar to the pragmatic maxim how they use it goes very much against the spirit of it. Albeit in a different direction from how James used it.
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