The principle of empirical verifiability by David Hume is flawed.

Ok, this stuff is a little heady, and a little obtuse, so I'll try to break it down so it's easier to read. 1.) You start with the idea that "since the human lens has produced synthetic a priori concepts, i.e. love, justice, truth, being, etc. Hume's theory of language is flawed." The definition of an a priori concept is "existing in the mind prior to and independent of experience, as a faculty or character trait."(1) That means you are arguing that the concepts of love and justice and truth exist in our minds before we open our eyes or ears and have any sense of the world. Clearly this idea is simply not true. Does an infant understand the concept of justice? Can a newborn attach a meaning to the concept of hate? No, a child learns these ideas. From dependence on our parents and the support they give us we learn love, from learning of consequences we slowly understand justice, and from painful experience with illusion we learn to seek truth. This is the essence of empirical reasoning, and the cornerstone of Hume's writing. 2.) Just as a point of decorum, I would ask that when you cite a third party such as Ayer, you cite your sources. That makes it possible for the rest of us to follow your thought process and verify your information. To address your concern though, you bring up the very ‘problem of induction' that Hume is famous for. Inductive reasoning is simply the process of formulating a law based on limited observations of recurring phenomena. Or another way to put it is: I observed that the sun set yesterday I observed that the sun set the day before that I observed that the sun set every day before that for my whole life Therefore I conclude that the sun will set every day Hume argued that this style of reasoning was not deductively logically valid. He was right. Inductive reasoning is NOT deductively valid. He did NOT say that that this style has no meaning. Hume was the first to say that we needed this kind of reasoning to survive. The example he used was that we believe bread will sustain us because it has done so in the past, but this is not a guarantee that it will always continue to do so. He quickly points out however that a man who doubts this too much and insists on deductive logic will quickly starve to death! (2) But I'm sorry, I feel I may have missed your point. You say that Hume denied any meaning of or about the rabbit hole. This is not so. I still do not know what kind of meaning you hope to take away from such an encounter, but you would certainly come away with a greater personal experience with rabbit holes, thereby expanding upon the sensory impressions in your own head, making a greater amount of ideas available to you. All Hume would say is that you cannot know for certain that there is a rabbit in the hole until you have seen it! Where is the flaw in that? 3.) PRO: "Once again, this type of example is why Ayer modified Hume's theory of meaning in order to include those entities that are only verifiable in principle. Since Ayer's theory is better formulated to include these exceptions, Hume's theory is flawed." Ok, I'm afraid you may have lost me here. You say that Hume's theory is flawed because it does not allow for things that are verifiable only in principle. Since you have given no example of something that is "only verifiable in principle" I'm going to have to assume that you mean something like an analytic judgment. An analytic proposition is something that is true by definition, the classic example being "All triangles have 3 sides." which is of course true every time it is said. If you ever find a triangle which does NOT have 3 sides, you've just discovered a shape that is not in fact a triangle. Hume's argument for empirical viability in no way rules these out. 4.) PRO: "To state that we (humans) can grasp the concept of infinity or omnipotence based on our finite experience clearly defies reason and everyday experience. In other words, we are never able to experience infinite, yet we are able to assign certain entities the quality of infinity." Did you not read my last argument? We need not have experienced omnipotence or the infinite in order for our minds to expand upon existing ideas. Hume does not argue that our ideas are formed exactly by our sensory impressions, but rather that they are derived from them. To have the idea of omnipotence we need only have the idea of potency. Our minds imagine this potency as powerful as all encompassing. True, we will never have a sense of what it is like to be omnipotent, but we have an idea. That idea comes from experience. Just like Hume said, we can see gold and see a mountain, and in our minds for the idea of a golden mountain...that doesn't mean we've experienced one. 5) PRO: "If you take the function 1/x and then rotate 2pi around the x axis, and then take the integral of that function from 1 to infinity, you find a form that has finite volume but infinite surface area." For everyone who doesn't have a graphic calculator, you're probably thinking: What?! Sorry, that's an awful lot of math. But that's basically what your argument here boils down to: math. You're using advanced mathematics with imaginary numbers to support the idea that we can know things a priori, that is to say completely divorced from our sensory experience. It certainly appears that way when you jump into the deep end of the pool like that, but a little examination shows that things are actually a good deal simpler. Math is made up of building blocks. Nowhere else is it so true that you have to crawl before you can walk, walk before you can run. By seeing a circle, we understand its shape. By measuring the circle, we begin to understand abstract ideas like pi. By beginning to understand abstract ideas, we get advanced mathematics. But this math does not simply spring to our heads unbidden. It is learned from our empirical experience. CITED 1: http://dictionary.reference.com... 2: Of course, having used this example I can no longer find the page number, so here's another place for a summary. If anyone really wants the page number in the text, I can find it later http://en.wikipedia.org...