Is Eliezer strawmanning positivism here? He says that all statements are defined by experimental predictions in positivism, but positivism also leaves room for logical deductions. So you could end up with empirical statements far removed from any observation. The statement, “Chocolate cakes rarely materialize spontaneously,” constrains future observation. But from that it follows that the odds of a cake just now materializing in the center of the sun are low. Because to say that something happens rarely, is to say that there is a low probability of it happening at any given time and place.
Or does logical positivism also forbid generalizations of that kind?
It also seems that any accurate model, predicting what we can expect from the sun in the future, would, as a side effect, predict how likely it is for cakes to form. For example, our model of the sun is based on the theory that it’s made of matter like we find on earth, playing by the same rules.
I think you’re right. Even Ayer’s painfully naive version of positivism would not have said Eliezer’s sun cake sentence was meaningless; certainly that’s not what you’d get from the views of Carnap or Neurath. But perhaps Eliezer was more interested in talking about Ayer’s fanboys than about the major logical positivist philosophers, and there certainly are people who discover Ayer’s verification principle (or Popper’s falsification principle) and immediately develop an extreme overconfidence in its ability to simply dissolve all manner of problems.
Is Eliezer strawmanning positivism here? He says that all statements are defined by experimental predictions in positivism, but positivism also leaves room for logical deductions. So you could end up with empirical statements far removed from any observation. The statement, “Chocolate cakes rarely materialize spontaneously,” constrains future observation. But from that it follows that the odds of a cake just now materializing in the center of the sun are low. Because to say that something happens rarely, is to say that there is a low probability of it happening at any given time and place.
Or does logical positivism also forbid generalizations of that kind?
It also seems that any accurate model, predicting what we can expect from the sun in the future, would, as a side effect, predict how likely it is for cakes to form. For example, our model of the sun is based on the theory that it’s made of matter like we find on earth, playing by the same rules.
I think you’re right. Even Ayer’s painfully naive version of positivism would not have said Eliezer’s sun cake sentence was meaningless; certainly that’s not what you’d get from the views of Carnap or Neurath. But perhaps Eliezer was more interested in talking about Ayer’s fanboys than about the major logical positivist philosophers, and there certainly are people who discover Ayer’s verification principle (or Popper’s falsification principle) and immediately develop an extreme overconfidence in its ability to simply dissolve all manner of problems.