Political Theory

Re: Help me understand this

Cobra Commander — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:32:53 GMT

I don't think he was saying that q is then true. He was trying to demonstrate that any statement is scientific or has empirical meaning if you use the verifiability as the standard for scientific statements. So q would be a scientific statement using verifiability.

Re: Help me understand this

nirgrahamUK — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:08:47 GMT

ive not read gordons book, but im not sure what this is showing,

p or q

     not -p 
     ______
      q

it seems falalcious on its face.   From not (not p) you can only get that P is true, and tfrom the first premis you have that  P or Q is true,
you cannot validly deduce that q is true. unless there is more to the argument it doesn not tell you whether Q is true or false.

Re: Help me understand this

Cobra Commander — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:58:34 GMT

huh, that's what I thought, but something just didn't seem right.

Well that's fairly devestating for the verifiable criterion isn't?

Re: Help me understand this

nirgrahamUK — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:50:56 GMT

if P is true, regardless of whether Q is true or false then

(P or Q) is true

is it true that (3 is greater than zero or 3 is less than or equal to zero)? yes. that is true.

Help me understand this

Cobra Commander — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:40:08 GMT

So I was reading David Gordon's The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, and everything was fine and dandy until this part came up:

"I do not think so. In point of fact, the criterion is worthless, since every statement comes out verifiable under it. Suppose that "p" is a non-controversially verifiable statement, e.g., "there is a chair in this room." Let us take "q" to be a statement logical positivists reject as meaningless. A good example is one that Rudolf Carnap held up to ridicule when he called for an end to metaphysics. He cited the following from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927): "The not nothings itself." I shall not attempt to explain this: one can see why Carnap presented it as a paradigm instance of a meaningless statement.

Does the verification principle eliminate it? Surprisingly, it does not. From p, we deduce p or q. (This step is non-controversial.) Assuming that a logical consequence of a verifiable proposition is itself verifiable, (p or q) is verifiable. Further, if p is verifiable, then the negation of p is verifiable; this principle seems difficult to question. Now, consider this argument:

     p or q 
     not -p 
     ______
      q

This argument is valid, and each of its premises is verifiable. Then, q is a logical consequence of verifiable propositions, and it, too, is verifiable. Clearly, if the verification criterion cannot eliminate "the not nothings itself," it is not worth very much."

What I'm having trouble with is the bolded part. How do you deduce p or q from p? If this is painfully nubbish I apologize.