PHIL 24320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Falsifiability, General Idea
Document Summary
General idea: all knowledge is grounded in either observation/experience of the world around us or mastery of our own concepts. There is a principle that links truth and observation, but it"s just a kind of nuanced principle. If you"re coming up with a list of knowledge (things we know), all of those are going to be true, because knowledge is of the truth. 1st approximation: if we"re looking at things that are true, we may not know that they"re true by experience/observation or by definition. However, if something is true, then it must be in principle possible to verify it through experience/observation or it"s going to be true by definition. Verification = coming up with positive evidence in favor of the truth. If a claim is true, then either experience/observation could secure it"s truth or definition. Side note: he"s different from a classical empiricist, because he adds something else that the classical empiricists did not want to say.
