Tyrrell_McAllister comments on The Power of Positivist Thinking - Less Wrong
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So... first of all, I'd like someone to look up the logical positivists and say what it is they actually believed. My impression is that so far as their verbal description of their philosophy went, if not its actual use, they claimed that the meaning of any phrase consisted entirely in its impact on experience, and that no other aspect of it is meaningful. This implies that a theory of photons which had photons vanishing as soon as they crossed the horizon of the expanding universe, and a theory which had the photons continuing undetectably onward, had the same meaning.
If this is not logical positivism, then let me be corrected.
The position you're describing sounds to me like what I would call reductionism, and I would agree with the caveat that certain meaningful entities can have logical elements - for example, I am willing to consider "the sum of 2 + 2" apart from any particular calculator that calculates it; its meaning is distinct from the meaning of "the result of calculator X" where calculator X is any physical thing I can point to including my own brain. I have no idea if this reflects reality, but I am unable to make my map work without logical as well as physical elements. I am, however, entirely willing to reduce every meaning to some mixture of physical stuffs and abstract computations.
Is there any point in arguing over whether we are "logical positivists" apart from the particulars of the stance? :)
Logical positivists never reached complete agreement about just what the verificationist criterion entailed. (Their inability to meet their own high standards in this regard was their downfall.) For example, I've read that some of them considered it meaningless to ask whether there's life after death. Whether it is meaningless was apparently a matter of debate among them.
From what I've read, though, the "mainstream" view among them would be that your two theories have different meanings. As I tried to explain in this comment to your OvercomingBias post "No Logical Positivist I", they held that meaningful statements had to be logically reducible to descriptions of possible experience. To quote my earlier comment, "They held that if A is a meaningful (because verifiable) assertion that something happened, and B is likewise, then A & B is meaningful by virtue of being logically analyzable in terms of the meaning of A and B. They would maintain this even if the events asserted in A and B had disjoint light cones, so that you could never experimentally verify them both."
But why take my word for it :)? I'm replying to this comment because I recently came across an article that seems to answer you question. Published in 1931, it was one of the very first articles to present logical positivism to the English-language audience. Here's the reference:
Blumberg and Feigl, "Logical Positivism: A New Movement in European Philosophy", The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 11 (May 21, 1931), pp. 281-296
It's available through JSTOR at the following URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2015437
Here is the relevant excerpt:
It looks to me like observing events beyond the edge of the observable universe is impossible in the "type (b)" sense. But assertions about such events still have meaning, so it would seem to follow that two theories that make different claims about such events still have different meanings.