display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 5181 | A sentence is factually significant to someone if they know how to verify its proposition [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: A sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (Language,Truth and Logic [1936], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: 'I can't verify it, but I know a bloke who can'? 'If only I could think of a way to verify x'? 'This is unverifiable, but it is the only remaining possibility'? 'X is unverifiable, but it would nice if it was true'? Etc. |
| 5184 | Factual propositions imply (in conjunction with a few other premises) possible experiences [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: The mark of a genuinely factual proposition is that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those premises alone. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (Language,Truth and Logic [1936], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I.Berlin showed that any statement S could pass this test, because if you assert 'S' and 'If S then O', these two statements entail O, which could be some random observation. Verificationism kept meeting problems of this kind. |
| 5186 | Tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (Language,Truth and Logic [1936], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be false. Possibly the problem is that Ayer takes the whole proposition to be the unit of meaning, but actually meaninfulness only requires that we build up a claim about a possible world from semantic units. Blue bees live on square suns. |