🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <73878@hydra.gatech.EDU>, cegtitd@prism.gatech.EDU (Tim Dodd) writes:
[on whether religious talk can be considered meaningful]

|> In order to judge whether a particular concept is meaningful, it is not enough
|> to ask if the concept exists.  Even asking the question makes it clear that
|> it does.  One must ask if the concept has any real referents.  If it
|> cannot be shown that such referents exist, then the concept is meaningless
|> as it does not refer to anything.

It's not clear to me exactly what you mean by reality.  Religious believers in 
general think that God is part of reality, just that he is not demostrable by 
scientific means.  Is reality to be identified with physical reality?  In an 
earlier post (which apparantly no longer exists -- is this an ironic gesture 
on the part of Usenet?) you seemed to suggest that for a word or concept to be 
meaningful, it had not only to refer to an element of reality, but had to refer 
to an element that could (at least in principle) be detected.  Is this in fact 
your position?
	To clarify matters, could you tell me which of the following statements 
are meaningful?

		Physical laws exist.
		God exists (and what if the observable effects of these two 
statements are taken to be the same?).
		My daughter's imaginary playmate has brown hair (if this is 
meaningful, is it rendered less so by the fact that I don't have a daughter?)
		Noninteracting particles exist.
		Some objects are beautiful.
		Some statements are meaningful.

The last statement (I believe) echoes a complaint about logical positivism.  
It seems pretty clear to me that the concept of meaning that you espouse is 
itself meaningless under your own definition (meaning does not, after all, 
refer to anything observable), and is in fact a philosophical rather than 
a scientific statement.  

		


-- 
Steve Schaffner        sschaff@unixhub.slac.stanford.edu
	The opinions expressed may be mine, and may not be those of SLAC, 
Stanford University, or the DOE.