Yes, in many ways, with extended arguments. What exactly is your issue?
No, I never took 1 or 2 as a premise. Read it again.
Why? Because your intuition doesn't tell you that an undecidable statement is meaningless unless it is ontological?
No, because the specific arguments only work for ontological statements. E.g. the multiverse argument only works for the subset of ontological claims that are true in only some worlds.
Not following. Can you state your point plainly? Which part of my argument do you reject?
> said that you made a claim based on nothing but intuition
This isn't true - I've made numerous arguments for this claim not purely based on intuition.
>The argument that if it has no observable consequences, it is meaningless does not apply to only ontological statements.
I did not make this argument. This is a conclusion that's argued for, not an argument, and the arguments for this conclusion only apply to ontological statements.
If you take that as a premise and you consider it contradictory to my conclusion and you accept my premises, then the premises you accept imply a contradiction. That's your problem, not mine.
You certainly started by making a direct appeal to your own intuition. Such an argument can be refuted by intuiting differently.
I've made a number of different arguments. You can respond by taking ontological terms as primitive, but as I've argued there's strong reasons for rejecting that.
You don't have any systematic argument to that effect
Of course I do. Every one of the arguments I've put forward clearly applies only to the kinds of ontological statements I'm talking about. If an argument I believed was broader, then I'd believe a broader class of statements was meaningless. If you disagree, which specific argument of mine (not conclusion) doesn't?
I'm not interested in analytical definitions right now. That's how Quine argued against it and I don't care about that construction.
>I didn't mention a specific self-defeater as that's been discussed in the comments above.
I've responded to each comment, Which argument do you think has not been sufficiently responded to?
>1. Denying the existence of a deeper, unobservable reality or saying that speaking about it is nonsense is also useless for any kind of prediction
You're the one saying we should treat this notion as primitive. I'm not arguing for taking verificationism as an axiom, but as a considered and argued for conclusion. You obviously need far stronger arguments for your axioms/primitives than your argued conclusions.
>2. The Universe Doesn't Have to Play Nice
It seems like there's a great deal of agreement in that post. You concede that there's no way to obtain evidence against Boltzmann or any knowledge about realism, agreeing with my 1 and 2 above (which are controversial in philosophy.) I don't see what part of that post has an objection to the kind of reasoning here. I'm not saying the universe must play nice, I'm saying it's odd to assert a primitive under these conditions.
>Just because it is convenient to use exists in a way that refers to a particular scope of a multiverse, doesn't prevent us as treating the whole multiverse as just a rather unusual universal and using the term exists normally.
This would be consistent with my argument here, which is about claims that are true in some parts of the multiverse and false in others. If you retreat to the viewpoint that only statements about the multiverse can use the term exist, then you should still agree that statements like "chairs exist in our world" are meaningless.
>aren't claims about a multiverse inconsistent with your strong verificationism?
I think I live in a level IV multiverse, and the sense I mean this in is that my probability expectations are drawn from that multiverse conditioned on my current experience. It's entirely a statement about my expectations. (I also have a small probability mass on there being branches outside level IV with uncomputable universes, such as ones containing halting oracles.) I think this is meaningful but "the level IV multiverse actually exists" is not.
I do have the disclaimer in the middle of OP, but not upfront, to be fair.
>the verification principle does feel like an ontological claim as it is claiming that certain things don't exist or at least that talking about them is meaningless
These are very different things.
>how are you defining ontological
Claims of the sort "X exists" or synonyms like "X is real", when intended in a deeper sense than more colloquial usage (e.g. "my love for you is real" is not asserting an ontological claim, it's just expressing an emotion, "the stuff you see in the movies isn't real" is also not an ontological usage, "the tree in the forest exists even when nobody's looking at it" is an ontological claim, as well as "the past really happened". )
(Note that I view "the tree in the forest exists when people are looking at it" as just as meaningless - all there is is the experience of viewing a tree. Our models contain trees, but that's a claim about the territory, not the model.)
I don't believe I've done that.