Language is still not supernatural

Nicolas,

In your critique of my logical positivism you argue that we can never truly know what any of our propositions say with infinite precision because we can always claim that a word is not defined well enough (infinite precision) to perform the corresponding falsification test.

I will assume from your critique that you believe my process is equally flawed when applied internally within the mind of a single individual. That is, the flaw exists independent of there being two intellects who might have different interpretations of the same language.

I also assume from your posting that you believe that, while we cannot have infinite precision in meaning, we can have some precision. For if we could not, then language itself would be utterly useless and all science would be impossible.

These assumptions are not an unreasonable starting point. The question is whether language can be developed to arbitrary precision to address the falsification of a specific scientific proposition.

So now we must look at how we gauge the precision of language.


Let's take a little detour and consider a sample proposition:

Heat from a flame is reduced with distance from the flame.

This proposition contains several components: "heat", "flame", "reduced", "with distance".

Informally, we see that we are correlating heat, distance and flame. These three things are patterns of sensation. A flame is a recognized pattern of sensation that incorporates heat, light, sound and possibly smoke. Heat and distance are directly perceptible with our senses. The word "reduced" relates a set of empirical facts together - specifically relating the degree of sensation. The reduction in heat with distance is a mathematical model. In the model, the two degrees of sensation are related to one another in a given context. So we see that this proposition expresses a scientific theory, and it appears to succeed because we are simply mapping symbols to empirical measurements.

Informally, language terms in this proposition are symbols either for empirical measurements and categories or for mathematical relationships.


Can this be made formal? Yes it can. It's called science.

We create a formal language by associating mathematical symbols with the output from sensors, and create mathematical models that relate the different symbols. Imprecision in such a language is exactly the same imprecision we have in scientific theories. The crudity of our sensors is the crudity of our language. As we learn to improve our sensors, our definitions become more refined. As our mathematical models become more complex, our vocabulary of verbs becomes larger.

My claim is that the limits of precision of language in describing the real world are exactly the limits of science. Hence, the ultimate meaning of a proposition is the description of the falsification test (or tests) for the proposition.

Our brains are engines of science at the most basic level. Without this scientific ability, we would have no understanding of our world at all. Our personal scientific ability is what allows us to create language and to understand human subtleties like love, deception, and ethics.

doctor(logic)

P.S. Let's return to your favorite case: 'God exists, he will show up in X years'. Is this scientific? Can this proposition be falsified? If it cannot, it is outside of science and mathematics. Devise a scientific experiment that will falsify your proposition. If you can devise such an experiment, then the proposition is significant (at least in a purely logical sense).