Me: Not unless it asserts something. Otherwise, show me how you can falsify: 'A' ('A' does not stand for anything)
not-A. 'A' is thereby falsified.
To falsify something you have to produce an observation or argument that proves it false.
'
The earth orbits the sun' is not falsified by someone saying '
The earth does not orbit the sun', a proposition is not falsified by saying '
No it's not'.
But if you disagree, then we have answered the question in the OP.
Is there a way to refute '1 + 1 = 2'? Answer yes! Here goes:
'1 + 1 does not equal 2.
The physical "stuff out there" doesn't enter into it unless you choose to apply this logical construction. THEN you will be very hard pressed to show how this relationship works. The pragmatists win the day if you ask me. Rorty, the pragmatist postmodernist, agrees that truth is made, not discovered. You've got to get it out of your head that the world is language and logic. It's not; "we" are. Read Sartre's "Nausea" where he presents the thesis of radical contingency (so-called):...
I have read a lot more than Nausea - I like Satre and I am deeply tempted to follow you on that diversion but I think we should stick to the point.
"Stuff" is not logically constrained. But logic is all about constraint; it's a system of rules
Quite. Nor is truth constrained by logic. Logic only expounds on truth, it does not establish that truth.
What validates reasoning goes to logical construction. Both deductive argument and inductive arguments get their validity from their form, not from "the world".
Yes, logical constructions are
valid if they follow the form of logical constructions. But because a construction is valid it does not make the conclusion
sound.
Horses have tails, Socrates is a horse, therefore Socrates has a tail, is valid. In logic, that the premises and thus the conclusion are false does not matter, because the premises are simply assumed to be true. We cannot falsify the conclusion that
Socrates has a tail by looking at the logical construction, yet nevertheless it is false.
I'm not being condescending when I say you should look up predicate logic. If you say that simple predication as in "the grass is green" does not possess a logical function, then you don't understand what the logic of predication is. This etic combining you speak of. First, what is it for something to be green? the "greeness" before your requires a synthetic principle that subsumes all things that have this quality. This would be characterized as an instance of a universal quantifier, something like "all observable phenomena possessing x are y's". In other words, even the the greeness, once understood as such, is an occasion of logic, the logic quantification; you are already working within the influence of a principle in the simple act of recognition, and the analysis has not even gotten to the predication of greeness.
It is difficult if you introduce words like 'etic' without explaining what you mean by them, as if they were some technical philosophical term I ought to know. As far as I can see it is a term in cultural anthropology; I certainly do not 'speak of' it! Or was it just mistyped?
Likewise, I understand '
predicate logic' but not '
the logic of predication': I gather from Google the phrase occurs in a very complicated bit of Husserl that I haven't the energy to attempt to understand.
However I do know of the problem of universals like 'green' because it has been discussed by philosophers from ancient times and there is nothing simple about it - we don't 'understand it as such' - hence the problem.
But having suggested the problem you then say one particular interpretation would be 'an occasion of logic'. Well yes; if we all agree what a thing means then we can create propositions about it. If we create propositions we can draw logical inferences from them. But the inferences will still be of the same kind as
Socrates' tail; their truth will rest not on the chain of logic but on the correctness of the premises.
To cut this short, I think your point now amounts to saying that because we
can express a statement about the world in a symbolic form (
IF we can iron out any problems and ambiguities) - the same form we
would use
if were expressing a purely logical relationship - then the statement becomes purely logical and its truth is purely a function of logic.
i.e. because we can write out that argument concerning Socrates, or a statement about grass, using symbols and replacing connecting words with signs, then the truth (validity) of its conclusion becomes purely a question of whether we have followed the rules of logic.
As you must gather, I do not think that is true.
What does Plato have to do with it?
Plato thought that things like numbers exist, they are not just concepts that we attach to things that do exist. Indeed, for Plato, such concepts are the only things that do exist, 'real' objects just being imperfect reflections.
With your insistence that meaning and truth reside in the heavenly realm of abstractions and not down here on earth, I think Plato would recognise you as one of his own!