The meaning of 'meaningless'

Ok Doc, let us now try to give some order to the thoughts that came to my mind while reading your last two comments.

I must first say that I genuinely would like to know more about your efforts to formulate a new version of LP. One of the things I like with Logical Positivists is the way they say that natural language is in need of an overhaul, that it has exhausted its possibilities and need radical improvements if it is to carry us to the next step in our march forward. Actually I am myself currently involved in a project which, though not ostensibly such a thing, is in fact an effort to extend natural language by means of new data representation techniques.

First, some remarks about your coments about the statements I used as exemples

'All men are mortal' : You conclusively establish that this statement is vague. But, to me, vague is not the same as meaningless. Would'nt you agree that 'vague' means 'having a vague meaning', 'having some meaning, but an imprecise one' or 'having several possible meanings' but certainly not 'having no meaning at all'; and that is the meaning of 'meaningless'. So, if this is granted, 'All men are mortal' is a vague statement, thus not a meaningless one. Why then is the verification principle saying otherwise ? If transhumanism succeeds, it may even turn out to be false, as you rightly point out. But if a statement is false, it is not meaningless...

'All C14 nuclei will eventually disintegrate'. Well your treatment of this example is interesting, indeed, as it closely mirror some of the later developpments of LP, notably by R. Carnap and O. Neurath, as they tried to respond to the same kinds of challenges as those of my previous post.

Basically, you suggest that we should avoid saying :

(A) 'All C14 nuclei will eventually disintegrate'

and use instead :

(B) 'A given C14 nucleus will have a mean lifetime of 8000 years, and, after 8000 years, if the nucleus has not decayed, its mean lifetime will still be 8000 years.'

or :

(C) 'Half-life of C14 = 5730 years. As a function of Time, Quantity of C14 = Initial Quantity / exp(c * Time) where c = ln (0.5) / 5730 years.'

Boy, would that really make things easier ? (A) is immediatly understood, while (B) and (C) are rather more obscure at first. There is no doubt that (B) is a correct formulation while (A) is not. As you point out in your other post : 'Technically, there is no requirement that an individual C14 nucleus ever decay". And (C) is the technical data we need if we are going to actually use this knowlege to do something concrete, like dating an old artifact. But, again, all this does not make (A) meaningless. (A) is incorrect but, as you put it, we accept it because our brain "unconsciously reformulates" it. But is not "unconscious reformulation" another form of what we mean by 'meaning' ? (A) speaks to us; either because of this unconscious reformulation or because it make us form a wrong idea which is then easier to turn into a correct one than no idea at all. This is probably the reason why statements like (A) are so heavily used by teachers and the like.

I will leave natural laws for a later post. Let us briefly touch Turing Machines. Here, your interpretation is plainly wrong because it rests on a confusion. In mathematics, the translation of 'meaningless' is 'contradictory', like in 'The set theory axioms of Principia Mathematica are contradictory'. 'Undecidable' means something else : 'for which there is no proof'. The TM halting problem is undecidable, not contradictory.

I think this review of our arguments so far allows for some general remarks. In all cases, the problem revolves around the meaning of the word 'meaningless'. Everybody will agree that this word applies to such statements as 'potato airplane giggle green' and nobody wants to be seen uttering them. In other words, saying that what someone just said is meaningless, is a very loaded statement. It is not going to be taken lightly and thus must be backed with rock solid arguments. Logical Positivism claimed (very loudly) that they had such arguments in the form of the verification principle. Science, with its aura of precision and impartiality (then at its peak), was used to back this claim. People were therefore justified to demand of Logical Positivism the same sort of precision and reliability that scientific theories normally display.

Many were prepared to treat as nonsense the statements of established religions or idealist metaphysical philosophy. If the verification principle had been selective enough to target only this class of statement while leaving intact all the statements, like those above, which can quite noncontroversially be considered meaningful, there would have been cheers all round.

What do they got instead :

'All C14 atoms will eventually disintegrate' --> meaningless.
'The Turing Machine M terminates' --> meaningless.
'God exists, he will show up in 10^{1.000.000.000} years" --> meaningful.

This is dismal, to say the least. The bottom line, i.e. the conclusion that most philosophers have arrived at, seems to be that though they see, and some still value, what LP was trying to achieve, they consider that they have failed. The verification principle, having failed experimental testing, so to speak, has been abandoned. This view is summed up by AJ Ayer himself, who is reported to have said, when asked what was the main defect of LP : "I suppose the most important . . . was that nearly all of it was false" while adding, shortly afterwards, that he still believed in "the same general approach".

Now there are many aspects of the questions still untouched, like the relationship of LP with ethics which was alluded to earlier. We will leave that for a later post.