Saturday, June 07, 2014

Hmm …

… What did Wittgenstein mean by "The world is everything that is the case"?

According to the positivists' "verifiability principle," a statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in principle, by means of experience. Metaphysical statements cannot be proved by means of experience. Therefore, metaphysical statements are meaningless.
Plenty of people have reported experiences that can only be described as transcendent. Now it seems to me that transcendence is fairly regarded as metaphysical. Come to think of it, truth is widely regarded as transcendent. So I don't see that the metaphysical is necessarily outside the realm of experience. There surely are more facts in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by positivists.

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