Ex Cathedra

A proposition is meaningful only if it is verifiable.

A proposition is verifiable only if it can be proved or disproved or can be deduced from other propositions which are verifiable.

Statements that are not verifiable are cognitively meaningless although they may possess emotive meaning. – Krus’s summary of Mach’s logical positivism

That’s kind of a neat site if you want to know the ground-level basics of epistemology. Others (e.g., wikipedia) tell you way more than a sensible person would ever want to know about logical positivism and the rest.

I ain’t sayin’ Krus is the ultimate philosopher, and his CV is sound but not earth shattering: — we were doing rotated centroid factor analysis in the 1960s — we weren’t sure it meant anything. Of course I may have misunderstood his research area.

And his faith in visual statistics as a replacement for epistemology is a little starry-eyed for me, since I sometimes get baffled by tag clouds.

I don’t think he he’s a crank. He is a salesman and he’s got a pretty slick looking visualization tool for sale on the site and a little skepticism is always appropriate. I was a psych major, so why would you take my word that he got it mostly right?

I support a far simpler version of logical positivism.

Although our senses can deceive us, most of the time they don’t: If you see a bus headed for you, there’s probably a bus headed for you, and you’re fixin’ to have a bad day.

If you don’ t see any pixies under your garden shed, there probably aren’t any pixies under your garden shed

If you’re unsure about the pixies, let the cat out. If you don’t find pixie viscera on your doorstep, the pixies weren’t there.

The pixies are pretty much never there.