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2014 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

6. Falsificationism

verfasst von : Andreas Kapsner

Erschienen in: Logics and Falsifications

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In this chapter, I will investigate the central idea of the falsificationistic theories: An assertion is correct iff it is unfalsifiable.

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Vorheriges Kapitel From Proofs to Verifications, and on to Falsifications

Nächstes Kapitel Stage Five: Pure Falsificationism and Dual Intuitionistic Logic

See TOE, p. 8 and WTM, p. 82.

Dummett says that this has not dawned on people earlier because they were only thinking about a limited number of examples:

Why has [the primacy of incorrectness] been so persistently overlooked? Partly because of the tendency to concentrate on the decidable case: an expectation as to the outcome of a test may indifferently be described as an expectation that the result will be favorable or as an expectation that it will not be unfavorable. Even, perhaps, in part because of a tendency to think particularly of future-tense assertions which predict the occurrence of an observable state of affairs within or at a specified time; for then the positive expectation has a bound, and hence has substance—if it is not satisfied within the given time, it will be disappointed (WTM, p. 83).

I do not think Dummett would object to the thought in the last paragraph, and maybe even meant “\(\ldots \) has to be withdrawn when challenged” to be understood implicitly. Sometimes, I will likewise leave off this qualification in what follows.

TOE, p. 8.

My assessment here is largely in accord with Rumfitt (2007).

Dummett speaks both of falsifying a statement and falsifying an assertion. The only sensible way to understand the latter is to read it as elliptical for falsifying the asserted statement. There are other instances of this elliptical use of assertion, and at times, I will use it this way as well to avoid unwieldy sentences; an assertion proper, though, is quite explicitly a speech act.

Unless, of course, the statement to be falsified is about those capacities.

For one thing, his worries about statements that are not verified (or even known to be unverifiable) and known to be unfalsifiable that were mentioned in the last chapter should not arise. There are no such statements if a proof that there is no verification is already a falsification.

TOE, p. xxii.

Else it could hardly be explained that “The Jew of Linz” (Cornish 1998) has gained infamy instead of acclaim as a historical work. In the book, it is argued that Wittgenstein and Hitler met when they were school boys; Hitler, it is claimed, was so annoyed by Wittgenstein (possibly after a short homoerotic infatuation) that later in life, he was unable to shake off his dislike and projected it onto all jews, with disastrous consequences. Cornish does claim that Hitler purged the records of the school in question and thus makes it quite plausible that counter evidence to his thesis will never be found. The usually disdainful verdict of the reviewers of the book (see for example Monk (1998)) is based on the fact that there is precious little evidence for Cornish’s claims. They did not suggest that they could disprove those claims.

Or, if the thesis is that there is no such thing as a faultless disagreement, to explain why we have these mistaken intuitions. See Stojanovic (2007) for an attempt.

See Kölbel (2009) and references therein.

Wright (2006), p. 40.

Note that the rampant realist shares a problem with the contextualist: She too has to concede that one can be right, no matter how idiosyncratic one’s view is. Response-dependent realism would not have to allow for such a possibility; probably, the view would even entail that an idiosyncratic but right taste judgement is impossible, unless the relevant responses are those of a very small number of experts who happen to disagree with most other people.

See the contributions to Garcia-Carpintero and Kölbel (2008); other motivations for relativism include the analysis of future contingents and epistemic modals.

Ref. Stojanovic (2007) argues that the two approaches are merely notational variants.

Ref. Beall (2006).

Of course, this is a highly problematic term. However, something strong is called for to convey the sense of something completely, utterly unacceptable (and something that is more catchy than “completely, utterly unacceptable”). One problem is that the term “perversion” carries a connotation of moral wrongness. Even though moral discourse has sometimes been suggested to allow for faultless disagreement, I intend to restrict myself to the taste examples here.

The slope is a slippery one, though. If I sincerely uttered “Human flesh is tasty”, then many would agree that this is an instance of perversion. The question, however, is where the perversion lies. I think it is not in the taste judgment itself (after all, human flesh might taste just like chicken). Rather, knowing what human flesh tastes like already proves my depravity.

We all can think of even clearer and more convincing examples; however, I prefer not to spell any of them out here.

These judgements can and will change over time. What once had been taken by the majority to be unacceptable might have become acceptable today and vice versa.

Clearly, to say that X is not tasty is not to claim that “X is tasty” is falsifiable, but that “X is not tasty” is not a perverted judgement.

Dummett at one point derides this assumption as a “Pavlovian reaction” (Auxier and Hahn 2007, p. 180) of philosophers talking about truth. Not that he himself had never displayed this reaction before.

WTM, p. 82.

As opposed to cases where the (possibly temporary) absence of proof suffices for recognizable incorrectness, such as mathematical statements.

Titel: Falsificationism
verfasst von: Andreas Kapsner
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Logics and Falsifications
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05205-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-05206-9

Copyright-Jahr: 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05206-9_6

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