Keelefilosoofia raamat
whether the lights are on, and . . . . These qualifications do not foreseeably
come to an end. If we try to build in the appropriate hedges ("If you walk
into the room, and you have your eyes open, and your sensory apparatus is
functioning, . . . "), more qualifications crop up: Are you walking forward
rather than backing into the room? Has something been interposed between
you and the chair? Has the chair been camouflaged? Has it been rendered
invisible by Martians? Has your brain been altered by a freakish burst of
Q-radiation from the sky? We can go on like this for days.
The moral is that what we take to be "the" verification condition for a
given empirical statement presupposes a massive background of default
auxiliary assumptions. Those assumptions are usually perfectly reasonable,
and it is no accident that we make them. But a particular "verification condi-
tion" is associated with a given sentence only if we choose to rely on such
annaabi.ee 
