Let’s tease apart what you mean in trying to distinguish “empirical” claims from “unempirical” ones. You think that “Windows sucks” is an empirical claim, while, say, “Madonna sucks” is not. What does this mean?
(1) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” is meaningless. We all understand the sentence perfectly well.
(2) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” fails to convey information about the world. Certainly it largely or entirely conveys information about the speaker’s preferences; but those preferences are themselves a part of the world. “I prefer not to listen to Justin Bieber’s music.” is an empirical claim, a worldly claim, one you can be right or wrong about, one with perfectly ordinary truth conditions; so certainly, if that is the meaning of “Justin Bieber sucks,” the latter sentence must be empirical too.
(3) Perhaps the idea is that “Windows sucks” conveys information ‘straightforwardly,’ while “Madonna sucks” only conveys information by implicature — we learn things aplenty when you assert it, but we don’t learn about what you literally asserted. But all assertions have implicatures, even paradigmatically empirical ones. And all assertions convey at least as much information about the beliefs and values of the asserter as they do about the thing asserted.
(4) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” isn’t making a claim. Something really is being asserted… grammatically, at least.
Perhaps it means that “Madonna sucks” does not correspond to a proposition? Intuitively, “Bob is in pain” and “Is Bob in pain?” and “Be in pain, Bob!” share a certain propositional content, . The interjection “ouch!” and the word “linoleum” and my hairstyle, on the other hand, seem to lack propositional content.
But it’s hard to see here how we could demonstrate that “Madonna sucks” is nonpropositional — it certainly seems to be asserting some fact, and if we claim to be radically mistaken in this case, it seems to put us in danger of falling into a radical skepticism about the propositional content of all our assertions.
What is being asserted? Well, at a minimum, “sucks” is being predicated of an object, “Madonna.” There is some entity such that it is the individual Madonna, and this individual sucks. Perhaps “sucks” is like “is sinful” or “is a witch,” and there is no real-world property that corresponds to it; but in that case it doesn’t follow that is not a proposition. It only follows that all propositions of the form , where “sucks” is used in the Madonna way and not the Windows way, are false propositions. The lack of a metaphysical basis for some term does not in itself force us to adopt a revisionary stance toward the term’s semantics.
(5) It can’t mean that the judgment “Madonna sucks” wasn’t arrived at as a result of weighing empirical data. The Madonna hater is performing the syllogism ‘All musicians who create music that I find routinely agonizing are bad; Madonna creates such music; therefore Madonna is bad.’ This badness is predicated because of the individual’s experiences.
(6) Similarly, it can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” is an incorrigible belief. New data could convince me that Madonna doesn’t suck after all — that she no longer sucks (because her new CD is excellent), or that she never sucked in the first place (because I mistook someone else’s music for hers, or because my music-evaluating faculties were impaired when I first listened to her).
So much for psychological incorrigibility. But perhaps the belief is ‘unfalsifiable,’ in some deeper sense? It’s not clear to me how. And this deprives us of the main criterion for distinguishing “Windows sucks” from “Madonna sucks;” for in both cases the sophisticated ethicist could argue that his/her truth-conditions for “x sucks” are straightforwardly empirical.
Well said. It seems to me that John_Maxwell_IV is trying to put more weight on the rough-and-ready “fact vs opinion” distinction than it can bear. The empirical/non-empirical divide is an (the?) important dimension of that.
But all assertions have implicatures, even paradigmatically empirical ones. And all assertions convey at least as much information about the beliefs and values of the asserter as they do about the thing asserted.
I disagree. The claim “Justin Bieber sucks” conveys information about the preferences of the speaker to a greater degree than “Windows sucks”.
It only follows that all propositions of the form , where “sucks” is used in the Madonna way and not the Windows way, are false propositions.
Sure, you can call them false, but they’re an interesting subset of false propositions that are false not because they make incorrect statements about the world but because they don’t correspond to real-world properties. And it may be useful to hack your brain to think of such a proposition as “true” self-efficacy purposes.
(6) Similarly, it can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” is an incorrigible belief. New data could convince me that Madonna doesn’t suck after all — that she no longer sucks (because her new CD is excellent), or that she never sucked in the first place (because I mistook someone else’s music for hers, or because my music-evaluating faculties were impaired when I first listened to her).
You would be being kinda silly though because as you say, “Madonna sucks” corresponds to no real-world property. From a purely pragmatic perspective, you experience no loss regardless of the truth value you assign to statements that have dangling pointers to things that aren’t real-world properties. So you might as well choose whatever truth value you want for the purpose of helping your brain get things done.
Let’s tease apart what you mean in trying to distinguish “empirical” claims from “unempirical” ones. You think that “Windows sucks” is an empirical claim, while, say, “Madonna sucks” is not. What does this mean?
(1) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” is meaningless. We all understand the sentence perfectly well.
(2) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” fails to convey information about the world. Certainly it largely or entirely conveys information about the speaker’s preferences; but those preferences are themselves a part of the world. “I prefer not to listen to Justin Bieber’s music.” is an empirical claim, a worldly claim, one you can be right or wrong about, one with perfectly ordinary truth conditions; so certainly, if that is the meaning of “Justin Bieber sucks,” the latter sentence must be empirical too.
(3) Perhaps the idea is that “Windows sucks” conveys information ‘straightforwardly,’ while “Madonna sucks” only conveys information by implicature — we learn things aplenty when you assert it, but we don’t learn about what you literally asserted. But all assertions have implicatures, even paradigmatically empirical ones. And all assertions convey at least as much information about the beliefs and values of the asserter as they do about the thing asserted.
(4) It can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” isn’t making a claim. Something really is being asserted… grammatically, at least.
Perhaps it means that “Madonna sucks” does not correspond to a proposition? Intuitively, “Bob is in pain” and “Is Bob in pain?” and “Be in pain, Bob!” share a certain propositional content, . The interjection “ouch!” and the word “linoleum” and my hairstyle, on the other hand, seem to lack propositional content.
But it’s hard to see here how we could demonstrate that “Madonna sucks” is nonpropositional — it certainly seems to be asserting some fact, and if we claim to be radically mistaken in this case, it seems to put us in danger of falling into a radical skepticism about the propositional content of all our assertions.
What is being asserted? Well, at a minimum, “sucks” is being predicated of an object, “Madonna.” There is some entity such that it is the individual Madonna, and this individual sucks. Perhaps “sucks” is like “is sinful” or “is a witch,” and there is no real-world property that corresponds to it; but in that case it doesn’t follow that is not a proposition. It only follows that all propositions of the form , where “sucks” is used in the Madonna way and not the Windows way, are false propositions. The lack of a metaphysical basis for some term does not in itself force us to adopt a revisionary stance toward the term’s semantics.
(5) It can’t mean that the judgment “Madonna sucks” wasn’t arrived at as a result of weighing empirical data. The Madonna hater is performing the syllogism ‘All musicians who create music that I find routinely agonizing are bad; Madonna creates such music; therefore Madonna is bad.’ This badness is predicated because of the individual’s experiences.
(6) Similarly, it can’t mean that “Madonna sucks” is an incorrigible belief. New data could convince me that Madonna doesn’t suck after all — that she no longer sucks (because her new CD is excellent), or that she never sucked in the first place (because I mistook someone else’s music for hers, or because my music-evaluating faculties were impaired when I first listened to her).
So much for psychological incorrigibility. But perhaps the belief is ‘unfalsifiable,’ in some deeper sense? It’s not clear to me how. And this deprives us of the main criterion for distinguishing “Windows sucks” from “Madonna sucks;” for in both cases the sophisticated ethicist could argue that his/her truth-conditions for “x sucks” are straightforwardly empirical.
Well said. It seems to me that John_Maxwell_IV is trying to put more weight on the rough-and-ready “fact vs opinion” distinction than it can bear. The empirical/non-empirical divide is an (the?) important dimension of that.
I disagree. The claim “Justin Bieber sucks” conveys information about the preferences of the speaker to a greater degree than “Windows sucks”.
Sure, you can call them false, but they’re an interesting subset of false propositions that are false not because they make incorrect statements about the world but because they don’t correspond to real-world properties. And it may be useful to hack your brain to think of such a proposition as “true” self-efficacy purposes.
You would be being kinda silly though because as you say, “Madonna sucks” corresponds to no real-world property. From a purely pragmatic perspective, you experience no loss regardless of the truth value you assign to statements that have dangling pointers to things that aren’t real-world properties. So you might as well choose whatever truth value you want for the purpose of helping your brain get things done.