Verificationism
Is it really true?
Verificationism is the idea that a sentence is meaningless unless it can be empirically verified.
Seems reasonable to me.
The problem is that it doesn't really work.
Verificationism itself is an idea that can't be empirically verified yet isn't really meaningless.
And what does "empirically verified" mean when we've known since Hume that all knowledge of reality is uncertain?
And yet it seems a bit drastic to say that statements can't be verified. And there is the issue that unverifiable statements are actually pretty meaningful.
We see the problem in spades these days. From my perspective a lot of people are being very credulous these says. They are accepting statements asserted without evidence as true. And the wilder the assertion, as in "liberal cabal of satan worshipping child abusing cannibals", the more it appeals in some circles. I don't think a statement like that can be verified empirically. I've not even seen anyone try but it's certainly meaningful.
I take scientific knowledge to be verified. It's kind of the best example we have of verified knowledge. We get around Hume's problem by saying that we don't have absolute knowledge. Instead we have "the best we know" and that works quite well. Science is "consilient", in EO Wilson's term, in that the best we know in one branch of science fits well with the best we know in another branch. The best we know in physics fits well with the best we know in chemistry or biology for example. Science is also a global endeavor - it's benefits are so great that all cultures adopt to a greater or lesser degree. Science grows in influence over time.
That's a structural problem for conspiracy theories it seems to me. Over time the disconnect from reality causes so many problems that people abandon the idea. By problems I mean things like being busted for participating in an insurrection after believing a man known to be a serial liar. After a while having friends, family and co-workers treat you as a dangerous nut has to wear on the soul.
Verificationism might be the last attempt to somehow make statements that are absolutely true. That was a thousands of years old philosophic problem arising from the Greek tradition. But philosophy in the last century became informed by ideas that were very foreign to the ancients like quantum mechanics and general relativity and natural selection. Now it's possible to think of meaning in a new way. From Quine I got the thought that ideas exist among other ideas. The meaning of a statement emerges from the interaction of a web of ideas. We're also highly aware that our thoughts emerge from the interaction of trillions of neurons that don't think. So meaning is not found in reality. It's found in how an organism responds to its environment. And the verification is in what happens next.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.