Overly demanding.

One of its basic tenets is that something isn’t “cognitively meaningful”, i.e. worth thinking about, unless it’s “verifiable”, i.e. you can determine for certain whether it’s true or false.

In real life, we can function perfectly well by using a probabilistic approach and merely assuming that certain things are very likely to be true. Indeed, philosophically very little if anything can be said to be certain.

Even science doesn’t require certainty or total “verifiability”. Instead it applies falsifiability or the establishment of conditions that would render something false if satisfied. A theory like evolution has a great many things which, if found, would completely discredit it. (The famous example is fossil rabbits from the pre-Cambrian era.) The fact that these things haven’t been found speaks to the strength of the theory.

Posted: September 30th 2010

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