Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve revived the ancient Greek atomist, Democritus. You go up to him and say “hey your atom idea was really great! I mean it was wrong, but it was close to true!”

He replies “Oh? How were atoms proven false?”

“Well,” you say “first we found there are things that can be divided forever like light.”

To which Democritus concedes “Ah yes that’s a good point. But do at least some things have atoms?”

“Yeah actually! There’s only one problem, we split atoms into even smaller stuff we call quarks and leptons. Those we can’t divide, but unfortunately for your theory we can tear apart atoms.”

Democritus looks at you dumbfounded for a moment. When he recovers his composure he says very calmly, “So my basic point that there are indivisible things that make up matter is right, but I only get partial credit because you decided to mislabel things?”

“We thought we discovered atoms back a couple of centuries ago, so we placed that name on the stuff we found. We just later split that stuff and decided it wasn’t worth it to rename everything we had.”

“So you use your reluctance to name things correctly as a knock against my theory?! You’re giving me a C when I clearly deserve a B+!”

“Wait a minute, how do you know how to use the modern American school grading system for analogy purposes?!”

At this point we leave the dialog before the crack in the fourth wall becomes a major structural issue with catastrophic results.

But I hope I’ve made my point. This is a mistake akin to the mistake that causes people to think “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is an interesting question.

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So could “the greatest misery…” or “the highest number of paperclips”. Maths is deduction withing a formal that isn’t about anything outside. Physics is deduction within a formal system that *is* about something outside, which is why physical theories can be falsified if they do not match experiment. But at least we know how to match the symbols of the formalism to bits of reality. True formalisms of morality need to be true about soemthing, but about what?

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LP seems to be assertign soemthign that anethatises some fields.

It may be doing so on the basis of a definition, ie arguetn by tendentious redefinition, which is a fallacy.

See Theisen’s reply below.

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b) The philosophy of “it just works” is pargmat(ic)ism, not LP.

c) “Working” is defined more vaguely than LP-es might wish. Maybe prayer works to get you into heaven…

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As for aesthetics, there is currently no objective way of measuring aesthetic value and unlikely to ever be one.

For both morality and aesthetics, the best we can do is to offer some general guidelines. These guidelines may be sufficient to characterize certain things as being either unaesthetic or immoral, but as regards others there will be disagreements. The way to reach decisions on such matters is to discuss them freely and allow people, either individually or collectively, to make a knowledgeable choice.

Regarding logical positivism, I take verifiability as a definition of meaningfulness. The principle should be self-evident and therefore beyond any need to be shown as itself being meaningful. The only reason why people object is that they want to include as meaningful such foolishness as the accumulation of sin and the cleansing of the soul of said sin.

Some day, after religion has run its course, we will be able to have meaningful talk about possible ways of acting in the world free of meaningless religious jargon.

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“My brain seems to exist in such a way that it reflectively endorses this system rather than another one. That’s an empirical observation.” Really? Is that an empirical observation in the scientific sense of the word? Did you perform that empirical observation?

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In logical positivism, as I understand things, *all* statements come as true or false or MEANINGLESS. That doesn’t even work out for mathematics. The statement “prime numbers are odd” is neither true nor false nor meaningless. It qualifies as undecideable until we have a clarification of what it means. And make no mistake, I intend it here as a statement which I will not clarify.

Also, what could logical positivism say about truths of human existence or in any way communicate lived experiences between people? Where we the logical positivist books on religion, art, or culture in general? Those books couldn’t get written by the logical positivists, because they all end up as *just* subjective fields. Consequently, not only does everyone have an opinion on them, but all opinions end up as having equal worth in religion, art, and cultural studies. It simply does not usually hold that the opinion of a Da Vinci scholar on the Mona Lisa has the exact same worth as that of a child seeing the Mona Lisa for the very first time. Yes, the child may have an insight that the critic missed. Yes, the child might have a new perspective worthy of more exploration. But, the opinions of the child simply will not have, usually, more value than the critic and the child will know less about the Mona Lisa than the critic. According to logical positivism, since art is *just* subjective all opinions immediately become the same in terms of worth.

Also, as I understand things, mathematicians will often tell you that mathematics is an art. Or they’ll emphasize the artistic aspect of mathematics. But logical positivism simply comes as horrible at analyzing art, doesn’t it? So logical positivism, if I’ve understood things correctly here, just comes as too shallow to develop a useful perspective to even understand mathematics.

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What about art/aeshetics statements like “I like X”? I guess you could say that falls under “kinda like science”, since I’m reporting the direct empircal experience of what I like. Still, it often seems useful to distinguish between objective measurements (external, repeatable) and subjective preferences.

Philosophically, I view morality as an aesthetic-like preference regarding the world and how it should be, but one that isn’t compatible with disagreement. We can disagree peacefully about eating avocado, but not about whether you have a right to kill me. If I don’t like anchovies I don’t need a world purged of anchovies.

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