"abbrevia" - 1 õppematerjal

Keelefilosoofia raamat

Hempel (1950) called the "directly observable characteristics" of ordinary objects, it remains true that verificationism collapses a sentence's meaning into the type of observational evidence we can have for that sentence, without remainder. For example, we are driven to a grotesquely revisionist view about scientific objects--the instrumentalist view that scientific statements about electrons, memory traces, other galaxies, and the like are merely abbrevia- tions of complex sets of statements about our own laboratory data. What is the verification condition of a sentence about an electron? Of course it is something macroscopic, something about meter readings or vapor trails in a cloud chamber or scattering patterns on a cathode ray tube or something of the sort. It is observable with the naked eye in the here and now. Are we really to believe that when we talk about subatomic particles we are not