I didn't introduce the term "cognitively meaningful" - it's in the comic we're all replying to.

This pretense that myself and others don't understand what's trying to be said is faulty. The comic would have worked had it said "substantively meaningful" instead...

...but my point (fuck Carnap, he's not here, and people need to think for themselves and present their own opinions from time to time) is that in human collective societies, truth claims themselves are as meaningful as they are broadly believed - or at least discussed.

That is dealing in some sense of human social meaning (and is also a statement on how hard it is to avoid each other these days). Where as logical positivists are trying to approximate some statement about the validity of perceptions of the universe, perceptions which which themselves can't escape our human contexts for understanding them.

So the logical positivists are discussing tools for gathering meanings the universe immediately cooperates with, where as I'm discussing what humans will co-operate with (and hence what is cognitively meaningful to our social brains). Which I find more interesting... As logical positivism is a boring, old, basic, and unavoidable premise for any reasonable person.

I'm superior, because I found an errant word in the comic and made a bunch of commenters online actually have an interesting discussion. :P j/k

Either that or I'm a kind of troll.

Personal beliefs expressed en masse seem to have shaped huge chunks of history and our planet, so…

Agree to disagree.

Did you run this by Clippy? Or at least, by the history of nation states and religious wars?

Because some very unverifiable and in that sense "unreal" beliefs have had some very meaningful and pivotal roles in history and civilization.

Thought-acts and speech acts can make the metaphysical meaningful, and have done so throughout human history.

..... remember how I said our species wasn't soley rational?

The odd thing is Being and Nothingness is held up as Sartre's great work when it's actually utter trash. Like if Linus Pauling was acclaimed for his crackpot idea that Vitamin C cures all cancer and as a footnote it's noted that he discovered DNA.

The scientific method is a consequence of believing the world around you to be emprically provably real, not the other way around.

My understanding of Kant isn't that the world exists outside of our brain, but that what we perceive as the world can never be determined because we perceive things differently. I mean, many of us don't even see the exact same colors for example. And this can be extended to quantum physics even when you consider that certain things are based on when they are observed.

I'm not the person you're replying to, nor an expert but wouldn't they be things like:

1. There is a reality which behaves according to certain principles within time.

2. Humans experience reality through flawed faculties, but experiences can be aggregated in ways which reduce or eliminate the impact of those flaws.

3. The more thoroughly those flaws are eliminated from the aggregate, the more reliably predictions can be made about the principles that govern reality.