Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
Reading; "explaining the role of definitions" as 'explaining the purpose of definitions';a natural phenomena can have no purpose; some would claim that science rejects such teleology ; whereas I would contend that such statements are simply not falsifiable. eg. 'The purpose of a cloud is to..... ? The purpose of the heart is to circulate blood in the organism. That's what it evolved to do, and that is its biological function. This statement is perfectly falsifiable but happens to be true. It's one of many counter-examples to your above assertion.
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to the extent that this is important. In any case, modern semantic analysis goes far beyond questions about definitions.
Well in conversations with linguistics academics and a quick read of linguistics primers; I found no theory of the purpose of personal or dictionary definitions. without which one has no basis for ranking such. But if you have come across any I am glad to hear about it.
That's probably because "definitions" aren't a significant subject of study within semantics, but there are techniques for giving semantic analyses of substantial subsets of natural languages, including philosophically important terms.
You could just as well argue that statements of empirical fact are falsifiable.
Well they are ; you claim(for example) that there are 5 people in the room and I count only four !; though I fail to see what connection this has to the above statement. Is there some confusion here; between an objectively false statement and an objectively falsifiable one ? No. The problem is that many "observations" in science are deeply bound up with theoretical insights that are required in order to understand what the observation is. That's one of the principal arguments against Popper's account of falsification, for example.
If you want to pursue this, I suggest finding a good book of collected papers in the philosophy of science (read Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyer-Abend, and others). At that point you'll be in a position to arrive at an informed opinion on the subject.
To which as usual I reply; put down your wretched books and think for yourself; you become a mathematician by doing mathematics; you become a philosopher by doing philosophy.
And the right way to do philosophy is to engage thoughtfully and critically with the best of what has been thought and developed by others, including your contemporaries. This is perfectly consistent with developing your own theories; but if you try to do the latter without any understanding of prior research in the field, what you produce is highly likely to be neither original nor interesting. With the right practice, dedication and reading, though, you can reach an understanding of the issues and develop skills that enable you to do philosophy well. Likewise, trying to prove a major theorem in mathematics without understanding prior mathematical results is likely to be a futile undertaking. In fact, you can't even understand most contemporary mathematical research without an extensive background in the field.
it's time for you to do some reading. Have fun! Well perhaps we will just have to agree to disagree about that ?
Whether you do the reading is a matter for you, of course, but without it, you are very unlikely to understand the issues at stake or to have anything worthwhile to say on the subject. By way of analogy, I haven't studied mathematics in depth. My chances of proving the Riemann hypothesis or of making any other significant contribution without the requisite study are negligible (epsilonic, as mathematicians might say, if not zero).