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The Confirmation Machine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Extract
It is customary to draw a distinction between statements unconfirmable in practice and statements unconfirmable in principle. It may be impossible, for example, to confirm the statement “The star most distant from us in the universe has recently doubled in size,” but this impossibility is not of a logical kind. We could conceive of tests which would either confirm or disconfirm the statement, even if in fact we cannot carry them out. In contrast, the statement ‘Everything has recently doubled in size’ cannot be confirmed for logical reasons, or so some philosophers have claimed. If everything were to double in size, including the very measuring rods used to detect expansions, it would be logically impossible, so the argument runs, to either confirm or disconfirm the above statement.
- Type
- Contributed Papers
- Information
- PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1970 , 1970 , pp. 306 - 321
- Copyright
- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970
References
Notes
1 I shall speak of statements as being confirmable or disconfirmable, but the argument would not be affected if for ‘statement’ we substituted ‘assertion’, ‘belief, or ‘sentence’.
2 See: P. F. Strawson's review of John Passmore's Philosophical Reasoning in Philosophical Books (1962) and Grünbaum, A., ‘Geometry, Chronometry and Empiricism’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III (ed. by Feigl, H. and Maxwell, G.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1962, p. 429Google Scholar.
3 For an argument in favor of the view that speaking of ‘meaningless statements’ is coherent, see: Erwin, E., The Concept of Meaninglessness, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1970, Chapter IVGoogle Scholar.
4 For an ingenious attempt to show how the above statement might be confirmed, see: Shoemaker, Sydney, ‘Time Without Change’, Journal of Philosophy (1969) 363-38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For example, we might get evidence that there is an inverse correlation between finding a white specimen at a given time of year and finding the entire species to be white.
6 Another formulation which is also inadequate is that of A. G. N. Flew: “And anything which would count against the assertion, or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it must be mistaken, must be part of (or the whole of) the meaning of the negation of that assertion.” See his, ‘Theology and Falsification’, reprinted in Nagel, E. and Brandt, R., Meaning and Knowledge, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1965Google Scholar.