A Conversation for Critical Rationalism
What is meaningful?
Gardener Started conversation Dec 25, 2004
Is Meaningfulness any different from the notions of Truth or falsehood? Anyway, the notions of falsehood or truth, meaningfullness or absurdity are there in our heads and serve as a tag that we stick on the outside world trying to denote our atttide to ( our interpretations of) it. But it hardly pays off to explain the phenomena of the world in terms of our own attitudes towards it i.e. truthful, falacious, meaningfull etc.
We either admit that there exist unequivical Laws ,functional or stochastic,(that are causes of themselves and other things) that we can interpret rightly in the fullness of time with the best possible precision afforded us. Or,else, the peculiar timid democracy of the mind reffered to as postmodernism in some sources and critical rationalism herein,where there is nothing truthfull but only meaningfull, threatens to engulf our ability to ratiocinate reasonably, turning everything into the amusing morsels of relativism and goobloodyhook.
By the way, bivalent logic (when employed by sobererly thinking) is Usefull and Ultimate in most of the cases that humans confront with in daily life, and only in handfull of judgements, such as "All Cretans are liars" and other similar pronouncements, do we need to favour multivalent logic before anything else.
What is meaningful?
Joe Otten Posted Jan 11, 2005
I wouldn't say that critical rationalism is denying that there are truths in the way that postmodernism does. It is qualifying what we can know about truths such as 'fundamental' scientific laws.
I largely agree with your attack on postmodernism.
I think the question of meaninglessness as opposed to falsehood is potentially an interesting philosophical one. Wittgenstein asserted that all metaphysical statements are meaningless - which being a metaphysical statement itself was meaningless by its own standard.
Some argue that statements that refer to themselves are meaningless - to avoid potential contradictions. This sentence is false. Etc. But it doesn't seem meaningless, does it?
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What is meaningful?
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