Eliezer, you’re definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it’s not just you—pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.
“Untestable” does not mean “untestable by humans using current technology”. What it means is untestable, period—even by (say) a hypothetical being with godlike powers. This is what distinguishes a chocolate cake in the sun from “post-colonial alienation”. If a chocolate cake spontaneously formed in the Sun, there would be physical consequences. These consequences would necessarily be detectable to sufficiently advanced beings. We need only imagine a Laplacian calculator, for example.
The feasibility of performing the verification is utterly beside the point, because we’re only interested in the meaning of the statement.
Contrast this with “post-colonial alienation”. The problem there is not that we lack some technological gadget. Rather, the problem is that no being, not even a god or a Laplacian demon, could verify the statement. In the case of a chocolate cake, you simply present God with a list of ingredients, and tell him/her to look for them in the Sun; but what do you tell God to look for in the works of Shakespeare in order to determine whether there is “post-colonial alienation”?
So this is not a counterexample to logical positivism at all. In fact, you yourself already gave the positivist’s reply to this criticism in “Belief in the Implied Invsible”. The point is, you’re allowed in logical positivism to use the full apparatus of mathematics and logic (and that includes probability theory!) in formulating theories (hence the name logical positivism); verificationism is not a constraint on mathematics.
Eliezer, you’re definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it’s not just you—pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.
How do you know that the phrase “logical positivism” refers to the correct formulation of the idea, rather than an exaggerated version? I have no trouble at all believing that a group of people discovered the very important notion that untestable claims can be meaningless, and then accidentally went way overboard into believing that difficult-to-test claims are meaningless too.
Contrast this with “post-colonial alienation”. The problem there is not that we lack some technological gadget. Rather, the problem is that no being, not even a god or a Laplacian demon, could verify the statement.
Surely a god would be intelligent enough to recognize post-colonial alienation when he sees it? After all, my professor can, and he’s no god!
Eliezer, you’re definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it’s not just you—pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.
“Untestable” does not mean “untestable by humans using current technology”. What it means is untestable, period—even by (say) a hypothetical being with godlike powers. This is what distinguishes a chocolate cake in the sun from “post-colonial alienation”. If a chocolate cake spontaneously formed in the Sun, there would be physical consequences. These consequences would necessarily be detectable to sufficiently advanced beings. We need only imagine a Laplacian calculator, for example.
The feasibility of performing the verification is utterly beside the point, because we’re only interested in the meaning of the statement.
Contrast this with “post-colonial alienation”. The problem there is not that we lack some technological gadget. Rather, the problem is that no being, not even a god or a Laplacian demon, could verify the statement. In the case of a chocolate cake, you simply present God with a list of ingredients, and tell him/her to look for them in the Sun; but what do you tell God to look for in the works of Shakespeare in order to determine whether there is “post-colonial alienation”?
So this is not a counterexample to logical positivism at all. In fact, you yourself already gave the positivist’s reply to this criticism in “Belief in the Implied Invsible”. The point is, you’re allowed in logical positivism to use the full apparatus of mathematics and logic (and that includes probability theory!) in formulating theories (hence the name logical positivism); verificationism is not a constraint on mathematics.
How do you know that the phrase “logical positivism” refers to the correct formulation of the idea, rather than an exaggerated version? I have no trouble at all believing that a group of people discovered the very important notion that untestable claims can be meaningless, and then accidentally went way overboard into believing that difficult-to-test claims are meaningless too.
Surely a god would be intelligent enough to recognize post-colonial alienation when he sees it? After all, my professor can, and he’s no god!