Question Would it be fair to say that philosophy is a manipulation of words, and that scientists deal with the relationship between language and extra-language observations? Thus "truth" would primarily be a language concept according to which consistency between words would exist. In the non-language (empirical) world truth would be infrequent because be empirical observations can rarely be one hundred percent verified.

Accepted:
September 22, 2012

Comments

To be candid, your question seems to embody some confusions. I'll try to address them in this reply.

1. I think it's fair to regard philosophy as the analysis (if you like, the logical manipulation) of concepts, although that view of philosophy is rejected by some philosophers. In any case, concepts can be expressed in any number of languages, so I wouldn't regard philosophy as the manipulation of words as such.

2. Scientists, as far as I can tell, don't in general examine the relationship between language and extralinguistic observations. Instead they try to explain or predict patterns of observations in as unified and elegant a way as they can manage.

3. I don't see how it follows ("Thus") from your first sentence that "truth [is] primarily a language concept according to which consistency between words would exist." First, what does "consistency between words" mean? Are "red" and "colorless" mutually inconsistent words because red and colorless are mutually inconsistent concepts? Second, more than consistency between concepts is required for truth: gold and mountain are mutually consistent concepts, but that doesn't make it true that a gold mountain exists.

4. Your last sentence seems to assume that the existence of true statements requires verification by empirical observations (whether 100% verification or not). That assumption seems to be a version of verificationism (discussed here), and it seems wrong. We ordinarily think of verifying an empirical statement as ascertaining or confirming its truth, not as making the statement true in the first place. (If quantum mechanics says otherwise, it departs from our ordinary way of thinking.) Most philosophers would deny that truth must be verified in order to exist, let alone that it must be verified with certainty in order to exist.