| |
| author |
Bram Carter
| | title |
How to Choose a Theory: Empiricism from Verificationism to Pragmatism
| | abstract |
This thesis establishes a connection between an important and controversial theory of
meaning championed by empiricists in the early twentieth century and a more reasonable
position with the same goal. The principle of verificationism is the theory that any meaningful
sentence is either analytically true or empirically verifiable. The original advocates of the
principle wanted a way to distinguish philosophy as genuine inquiry from baseless metaphysics.
The ambition of those empiricists lives on in a subtler framework of pragmatism that can still
accomplish the same goals. The first chapter of this thesis establishes the analytic/synthetic
distinction that provides the grounding for the principle of verificationism. Without solid criteria
for distinguishing analytic judgements from synthetic ones, empiricists would not have grounds
for admitting mathematics and definitional truths as meaningful. The second chapter takes a look
at theories of space and illustrates different ways of considering theoretical frameworks. Theories
of space and the resulting philosophical questions they provoke illustrate that theory often comes
down to a matter of convention. This conventional decision making becomes essential for the
pragmatic view in chapter three. The final chapter details the principle of verificationism itself
and offers a pragmatic notion of inductive verification as a softer grounding for the empiricist
project. Ultimately, the strict binary between verifiable theory and nonsense that the original
principle of verificationism established is untenable. Instead, we verify theories inductively.
Rather than conclusively confirming a theory, we gain confidence in the accuracy of our theories
each time we observe their implications born out in experience. While objective truth is a
hopeless idea, we can instead develop a high degree of efficiency in explaining what we observe
about the world.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2024)
|
| advisor |
Erik Anderson
|
| full text | BCarter.pdf |
| |
