Indeed there are claims where, if you pause and ask, “How could a universe be arranged so as to make this claim true, or alternatively false?”, you’ll suddenly realize that you didn’t have as strong a grasp on the claim’s truth-condition as you believed. “Suffering builds character”, say, or “All depressions result from bad monetary policy.” These claims aren’t necessarily meaningless, but they’re a lot easier to say, than to visualize the universe that makes them true or false. Just like asking after sensory consequences is an important hint to meaning or meaninglessness, so is asking how to configure the universe.
But if you say there has to be some arrangement of atoms that makes a meaningful claim true or false...
Then the theory of quantum mechanics would be meaningless a priori, because there’s no way to arrange atoms to make the theory of quantum mechanics true.
And when we discovered that the universe was not made of atoms, but rather quantum fields, all meaningful statements everywhere would have been revealed as false—since there’d be no atoms arranged to fulfill their truth-conditions.
Isn’t that just choosing the wrong scale on th worldmodel/map ,the other two claims can be made to predict a sensory input on a much closer scale to us (ie human bien or human behavior) And even if a lower scale in the worldmodel changes (ie atoms to quantum) the belief human behavior won’t change (if we admit the change in worldmodel doens’t change the way people act ).I’m not disagreeing wth OC here just pointing out something that doesnt seem quite right to me and hope someone will help “understand”
Isn’t that just choosing the wrong scale on th worldmodel/map ,the other two claims can be made to predict a sensory input on a much closer scale to us (ie human bien or human behavior) And even if a lower scale in the worldmodel changes (ie atoms to quantum) the belief human behavior won’t change (if we admit the change in worldmodel doens’t change the way people act ).I’m not disagreeing wth OC here just pointing out something that doesnt seem quite right to me and hope someone will help “understand”