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Your variation, that says "most of the time the contents are true", is an is statement, but it's entirely unverifiable. Good luck providing evidence for that! And even if you did, there's a very convenient out: "It's not true in this case."

The whole thing would be short-circuited by saying "When 1000 papers agree, and almost none disagree, we should take the claims to be broadly true."

Also, see how we've gone from having a discussion about the topic at hand to impossible-to-prove factual claims about how often a group of 1,000 academic papers are true? It doesn't seem like a very interesting discussion, at least to me.



Ought != unverifiable. That's the point. Go read the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem


Thank you for the wiki link. But I didn't say that "ought statements" are unverifiable.


You were saying that unverifiable statements were ought statements, by arguing that because you couldn't figure out how to defend a statement, it had to be an ought statement. The truth or verifiability of a statement has nothing to do with whether or not it's an is or an ought statement.




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