Page 6 - Boundedness Revisited

because of the denial of continuity explicit in their definitions.
This denial is the result of fixing the end of continuity itself by an
absolute nonfictional boundary; beyond this supposedly final edge
no further distinctions may be made. From the principle of
boundedness it has been shown that a boundary defined as non-
fictionally distinguishing an inside from its outside is invalid; if
either of two such discontinuous “realms” is further defined as
absolutely incompatible with its other side (i.e., cannot have
distinctions made in it), then that “realm” is also invalid. The irony
of absolute boundaries and incompatible “realms” is as a point of
doctrine shared by two schools of thought considered by each
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other absolutely incompatible: science and religion.

II. Boundedness and the issues of philosophy
The principle of boundedness and the technique of boundary
analysis may be profitably applied to the problems of
contemporary philosophy. The origin of much this unfinished
business may be traced to an unresolved dichotomy formalized by
the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. According to this duality, there are
two unrelated types of meaningful symbols, the synthetic and the
analytic, distinguished by two unrelated means of verifying
propositions they occur in, experience and logic. This conception
has permitted two consequences unfavorable to intellectual
disciplines: first, although the Vienna Circle effective purged
philosophy of aesthetic, ethical, and other meaningless issues, it
failed to eliminate ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical
questions; second, logic and metamathematics, on one hand, and
theoretical science, on the other, lost the guidance and control of a
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unified philosophy. The relevance of boundedness to these
problems is discussed in the following sections.

10 Science has retained the possibility of dualism to preserve empiricism’s
verifiability criterion; religion’s entire enterprise depends upon dualist theology.
11 I well understand that ethical and aesthetic questions are in fact debated
under the rubric of philosophy. But the latter should deal with truth rather than
personal preferences or justifications; the former, therefore, in my estimation,
should be relegated to other realms of inquiry. And scientists continue to spend
time on reifications they should ignore—“universe,” creatio ex nihilo, “point
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