s correspondence to reality. "An illustrated book about birds" makes no claim of fact. There is no way to prove it false and it is not meaningful. "I have an illustrated book about birds," however, provides the grounds on which the statement may be falsified. I might not actually possess such a book. Since the grounds for the statement itself carries falsification, the statement has meaning. Meaning is simply another way of saying that the statement has an actual value of truth or falsehood whether that be complete truth, complete falsehood, or some degree of both. "I have an illustrated book about birds that has no visibility or mass" disallows the only grounds by which the statement might be falsified and therefore is not a meaningful statement. All of these examples, of course, do not "prove" the original premise about falsifiability and meaningfulness. They merely show that our experience with reality corresponds to the logical deductions of that premise. Since mathematical statements do not promise to figure significantly in this little jaunt of mine, I will not devote much time to them. I will say, however, that my decision to accept them as a prior is not without reservation. It seems plausible that all mathematical statements are actually reasonable by virtue of the fact that they are dependent on the truth-value of our epistemological statements. At the same time, however, mathematical statements are not products of a chain of logical deductions and on these grounds I admit them as being a priori. Of much greater interest to me are the a priori statements, which compose an epistemology. We are always faced with the rather thorny problem of how to formulate such statements. We must go about the process with an eye towards ensuring that our epistemological statements correspond to observable reality. But to which elements of reality must our statements correspond? For that matter, which elements are actually real and not just ima...
