PHIL-215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Ex-Gay Movement, Reductionism, Empirical Evidence
Document Summary
The second dogma: recall the veri cationist"s theory of meaning. Maybe synonymous statements are statements that have the same veri cation conditions. Maybe the analytic truths are con rmed by any observation (or none?). Radical reductionism: every meaningful statement is translatable into a statement about immediate experience: quine cites locke and hume as old advocates of radical reductionism. Locke and hume talked about the meaningfulness of individual ideas (or terms), but it is better to think of the meaningfulness of entire statements as requiring such a reduction. There is associated also another unique range of possible sensory events whose occurrence would detract from that likelihood: quine"s objection: statements are not con rmed in such a one-by-one, isolated manner. Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body . Not individual terms, not even individual statements are con rmed by our experiences.
