What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Quine’s paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” took aim at the core of the positivist program, the verification theory of meaning. Quine pointed out that there was no way to verify single statements—all attempts to verify a statement inevitably involve the assumed truth of other statements, which are themselves subject to the same problem. For example, say the remote control for your TV isn’t working, and you can’t turn the TV on. You suspect that the batteries in the remote are dead. You can verify this by replacing the batteries and trying to turn on the TV with the remote again. You do this, and the TV turns on. Does that mean you were right? No. It’s entirely possible that the batteries in the remote weren’t dead at all. Maybe the remote has a short and will only work intermittently, no matter what batteries you use. Or maybe the old batteries were in backward, and you didn’t notice; you just popped them out and put in new ones pointing the right way. Or maybe something more exotic is going on: maybe the remote always worked, but when you tried it before, the TV mysteriously shifted its picture to the infrared and its sound to the ultrasonic, so you couldn’t see or hear it; the TV happened to go back to normal after you changed the batteries, but not because you changed them. This last idea is clearly preposterous—how could that happen?—but the point remains that in testing out the new batteries in the remote, you’ve assumed a wide variety of basic facts about the world, a...

Logical empiricim to everything is wrong