He is teavy

===========By J. L. S.


From an online source:

"There are statements which are ... pointless to work out. Examples given by Carnap include:

i. The average weight of the inhabitants of Vienna
whose telephone number ends with a 3
is x.

ii. In 1910 Vienna had only 6 inhabitants’.

He says of such sentences that

"they are really meaningful,
though they are pointless; for
it is only meaningful sentences
that are even divisible into
(theoretically) fruitful and sterile, true and false."

"It can be seen that there are two types of meaningless sentences or propositions, either strings of utter gibberish using ‘words’ which are not contained in our language, or sentences..."

"‘made of regular ... words… [which] because they are grammatical from a superficially syntactic point of view… [give] a kind of illusion of understanding.'"

"This second type is called a "pseudo-statement" because it appears to be grammatically a normal statement or proposition."

"Statements of Metaphysics are held to be pseudo-statements because although they are grammatically correct they are, in themselves meaningless, either because they are entirely nonsensical or because they contain a word whose meaning is not verifiable."

"Carnap gives the example"

iii. He is teavy.

"We would say that"

"‘in order to learn the meaning of this word, we ask him about its criterion of application: how is one to ascertain in a concrete case whether a given thing is teavy or not?’"

"If there are no circumstances in which we can empirically verify the meaning of the word then why should we believe that objects could have the attribute ‘teavy’ since it makes no difference to the world if it is true or false?"

"The Logical Positivists argued that the same thing could be held true of most of the claims of Metaphysics."


Etc.

His other examples in that "Elimination" essay are:

iv. Caesar is a prime number

and

v. Nothing noths.

The essay was first tr. to English by Swiss-born philosopher Arhur Pap (who died in 1959) and published by Ayer in 1959. Etc.