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Verification, falsification, and the logic of enquiry

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Abstract

Our starting point is Michael Luntley's falsificationist semantics for the logical connectives and quantifiers: the details of his account are criticised but we provide an alternative falsificationist semantics that yields intuitionist logic, as Luntley surmises such a semantics ought. Next an account of the logical connectives and quantifiers that combines verificationist and falsificationist perspectives is proposed and evaluated. While the logic is again intuitionist there is, somewhat surprisingly, an unavoidable asymmetry between the verification and falsification conditions for negation, the conditional, and the universal quantifier. Lastly we are lead to a novel characterization of realism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

    Peter Milne

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  1. Peter Milne
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Milne, P. Verification, falsification, and the logic of enquiry. Erkenntnis 34, 23–54 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00239431

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00239431

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