There is no getting away from it: the Logical Positivist nosology too is pitifully inadequate. Hegel just is different from Plotinus, and again from Foucault, and so on. Likewise, every specimen from (3) to (40) on my list is different from every other, as well as from the first two. Of course I cannot prove that all those things are different from one another, or even that any two of them are different. So if a Logical Positivist chose to dig in his heels, and insist that the ways in which thought can go wrong are all of them comprehended in the three categories of contingent falsity, self-contradiction, and unverifiability—well, I could not prove him wrong. But it is obvious enough that he is wrong. There are just more things in hell and earth than are dreamed of in his philosophy; thirty-odd more, at the least.
And yet there are philosophers, and beneficiaries of Logical Positivism at that, who actually propose, not to enlarge the Positivist nosology, but to contract it, to the point where it contains only one category! Now I ask you: what ought to be thought of a doctor, even in the most primitive state of medicine, who acknowledges the existence of only one disease? I am referring, of course, to Quine, who wants us to make do just with the category of contingent falsity:14 an excess of Positivist pedestrianism which deserves (though it will not receive in this book) an essay to itself.
That doctor would probably want to replace my broken parts with functional parts, rather than treat my diseases. The horror.
Just a very few of the labels used on this site are passwords I am thinking of, labels of the very few ways the forty are wrong. The resources enabling one to see underlying problems among the forty are on this website. However, it is better not to simply declare: “The problem behind most of them all is X”, where X is a label. Someone might believe me!
That doctor would probably want to replace my broken parts with functional parts, rather than treat my diseases. The horror.
Just a very few of the labels used on this site are passwords I am thinking of, labels of the very few ways the forty are wrong. The resources enabling one to see underlying problems among the forty are on this website. However, it is better not to simply declare: “The problem behind most of them all is X”, where X is a label. Someone might believe me!