Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington.

  • Carington, Whately, 1892-1947.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    104/288 (page 78)
    The argument, as I understand it, runs somewhat as follows: It is futile to assert that a proposition is true unless we can prescribe means for verifying it; if this cannot be done, the assertion, like the proposition itself, is meaningless, but there are certain propositions, such as ‘Snow fell in Manhattan Island on Christmas Day, a.d. i’, which it is impossible either to verify or to disprove; such a proposition accordingly cannot be said to be either true or false; but it is unquestionably a proposition, and therefore the law of ex¬ cluded middle, which requires it to be one or the other (B or not-B, true or not-true) is unsound. This, frankly, appears to me to be all rubbish, arising from a duplex confusion, (a) between the inherently impos¬ sible and the impracticably difficult; (b) between tautological certitude and the quantitative kind of assurance which is all we can ever attain in respect of any synthetic (matter of fact) proposition.1 To take the second first: The only sort of proposition about the truth of which we can be absolutely certain is the analytic or tautological proposition, of which the truth is assured by the definition of the symbols used. To take Ayer’s example, the proposition ‘2X5 = 10’ is known to be absolutely true, simply because the symbols used are so defined as to make it so. No amount of empirical evidence could make us doubt it. ‘It might easily happen . . . that when I came to count what I had taken to be five pairs of objects, I found that they amounted only to nine. . . . One would say that I was wrong in supposing that there were five pairs of objects to start with, or that one of the objects had been taken away while I was counting ... or that I had counted wrongly. One would adopt as an explanation whatever empirical hypothesis fitted in best with the accredited facts. The one explanation which would in no circumstances be adopted is that ten is not always the product of two and five.’2 And similarly in all such cases. 1 Cf. Ayer on the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ senses of ‘verifiable’ (Language, Truth and Logic, pp. 22-6). 2 Ibid., pp. 96-7.