Oops. Caught a mistake. This claim, from my post on generalizations, below: "when a revised statement of the law is generated, ruling out the circumstances under which the law does not hold, then the scope of the generalization has been reduced to the cases which actually have been observed by a community of subjects" is not right. The complete set of instances still hasn't been observed by the community, in most cases, even after the counter-examples have been. Further revision may, therefore, be necessary.
The big question is, of course, if all of these things are not meaningful in the simple sense, then why the hell do we seem to understand and accept them so readily? So far, I've determined that all of the following are challenged in the department of meaningfulness: (1) most generalizations which are not tautologies, including scientific laws, (2) assertions about the future, (3) unverifiable assertions about the past, and (4) any statements which try to reach beyond the limitations of our methods of interacting with the world and the structure of our language. And here are several kinds of sentences which are false. It appears to be no surprise that I am an atheist. I hardly believe in anything!
Pragmatism, based on mathematical probability, as I've noted somewhere, fills in a lot of the gaps. Many of our generalizations are useful even after we have decided to limit the scope of their applicability. These constitute the bulk of our scientific knowledge. Generalizations also constitute the totality of our stereotyping, prejudices, and other kinds of dangerous pseudo-science so we should continue to treat them all with the greatest caution. Generalizations appear to be comprehensible because they mimic the form of tautologies. By taking the structure of a sentence with a real meaning, they allow us to communicate between ourselves without actually depending upon a reference to the world.
I have to stop here, because my husband has already gone to the market and come back and begun working on tonight's dinner, and I can't think with the pressure to finish the housecleaning hovering over me. Perhaps I can get some more done in the morning. Perhaps I will simply report on our dinner and the Al Green show at the Ryman that we'll be attending afterwards.
11:54:49 AM 
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