“we need a nosology of thought”– Sure we have lists of all sorts of biases. But

–“we need a nosology of thought”–

Sure we have lists of all sorts of biases. But we don’t have a categorical listing of the various errors of philosophical thought. Most of which are artifacts of language.

–“The Logical Positivists, to their credit, at least tried to frame a nosology of thought less pitifully inadequate than the common one. They acknowledged three ways in which thought can go wrong: contingent falsity, self-contradiction, and meaninglessness. A proposition is meaningless, they said, if it is not a tautology and not verifiable either. Propositions about the precession of the equinoxes, for example, are verifiable, while propositions about the procession of the Holy Ghost are not. And verifiability, they said, consists in standing in a certain logical relation to observation-statements.”—