Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims

You've just reinvented logical positivism.

"You break it, you buy it."

This seems so different from all your other examples that I'm surprised you don't comment on it. It seems to be trying to impose a rule. You might say that most of the claims are trying to promote a preference, too, but I don't think you did.

Let's tease apart what you mean in trying to distinguish "empirical" claims from "unempirical" ones. You think that "Windows sucks" is an empirical claim, while, say, "Madonna sucks" is not. What does this mean?

(1) It can't mean that "Madonna sucks" is meaningless. We all understand the sentence perfectly well.

(2) It can't mean that "Madonna sucks" fails to convey information about the world. Certainly it largely or entirely conveys information about the speaker's preferences; but those preferences are themselves a part of the world. "I prefer not to listen to Justin Bieber's music." is an empirical claim, a worldly claim, one you can be right or wrong about, one with perfectly ordinary truth conditions; so certainly, if that is the meaning of "Justin Bieber sucks," the latter sentence must be empirical too.

(3) Perhaps the idea is that "Windows sucks" conveys information 'straightforwardly,' while "Madonna sucks" only conveys information by implicature — we learn things aplenty when you assert it, but we don't learn about what you literally asserted. But all assertions have implicatures, even paradigmatically empirical ones. And all assertions convey at least as much information about the beliefs and values of the asserter as they do about the thing asserted.

(4) It can't mean that "Madonna sucks" isn't making a claim. Something really is being asserted... grammatically, at least.

Perhaps it means that "Madonna sucks" does not correspond to a proposition? Intuitively, "Bob is in pain" and "Is Bob in pain?" and "Be in pain, Bob!" share a certain propositional content, . The interjection "ouch!" and the word "linoleum" and my hairstyle, on the other hand, seem to lack propositional content.

But it's hard to see here how we could demonstrate that "Madonna sucks" is nonpropositional — it certainly seems to be asserting some fact, and if we claim to be radically mistaken in this case, it seems to put us in danger of falling into a radical skepticism about the propositional content of all our assertions.

What is being asserted? Well, at a minimum, "sucks" is being predicated of an object, "Madonna." There is some entity such that it is the individual Madonna, and this individual sucks. Perhaps "sucks" is like "is sinful" or "is a witch," and there is no real-world property that corresponds to it; but in that case it doesn't follow that is not a proposition. It only follows that all propositions of the form , where "sucks" is used in the Madonna way and not the Windows way, are false propositions. The lack of a metaphysical basis for some term does not in itself force us to adopt a revisionary stance toward the term's semantics.

(5) It can't mean that the judgment "Madonna sucks" wasn't arrived at as a result of weighing empirical data. The Madonna hater is performing the syllogism 'All musicians who create music that I find routinely agonizing are bad; Madonna creates such music; therefore Madonna is bad.' This badness is predicated because of the individual's experiences.

(6) Similarly, it can't mean that "Madonna sucks" is an incorrigible belief. New data could convince me that Madonna doesn't suck after all — that she no longer sucks (because her new CD is excellent), or that she never sucked in the first place (because I mistook someone else's music for hers, or because my music-evaluating faculties were impaired when I first listened to her).

So much for psychological incorrigibility. But perhaps the belief is 'unfalsifiable,' in some deeper sense? It's not clear to me how. And this deprives us of the main criterion for distinguishing "Windows sucks" from "Madonna sucks;" for in both cases the sophisticated ethicist could argue that his/her truth-conditions for "x sucks" are straightforwardly empirical.

If you restrict yourself to empirical claims and preference claims when you have an argument, you and the people you argue with will be more pleased with the outcome of your arguments.

...backed by what evidence?

I suspect that most people can better achieve their preferences by consciously choosing and adopting attitudes rather than going with whatever defaults they grew up with or are prevalent within their social group.

I used to think that. Not so sure anymore.

Consider the advantages of going with the social group. The ingroup signaling of going with the herd. The institutional and social support for the defaults. Social support not just for achieving the ends, but for maintaining your attitudes and persevering along the common course.

The flip side of all those are the handicaps of consciously choosing and adopting. I also suspect that akrasia is much more common going into a societal headwind.

I suspect that if you actually run the numbers, people who go with the societal flow do better. Maybe they're not Steve Jobs, but neither are most of those who choose to buck society.

social rules and the details of their implementation.

I think you're unfair to suggest that these are only social rules. They seem to be mostly about morality to me. One can argue that morality is a social construct, but do so in a different place if that's what you think. Otherwise, your classification gets muddled.

Thing sometimes communicated by "X is crappy": "There are two tribes, those who hate X and those who love X. These are at war. I am in the tribe that hates X. If you like X, you are Evil. If you love X, you are my comrade."

Aesthetic judgement is a two-place function: “X likes Y.” But for human Xi's, “X1 likes Y”, “X2 likes Y”, “X3 likes Y” etc. tend to correlate with each other. So one could in principle draw a network like Network 1 in “How An Algorithm Feels From Inside”, with nodes labelled “X1 likes Y”, “X2 likes Y”, etc.; but it would be computationally infeasible to use such a network for anything, so one uses a network like Network 2 instead, with the central node labelled “Y is beautiful”. (But in reality, if you knew whether X1 likes Y, whether X2 likes Y, whether X3 likes Y, etc., there would be no question whether Y is beautiful left to ask.) This is a useful approximation, but breaks down with things lots of people like and lots of people dislike, e.g. Justin Bieber's music. (Even then, it may be useful to use a network like Network 2 but only including a certain subgroups of humans, e.g. musicians, or people like lukeprog who've heard lots and lots of different music, or people with IQ above 130, or people in my social circle, or people who wear leather jackets and long hair, etc.)

"Are attitudes bad?" That's an attitude question.

Your meaning of "attitude" seems to amount to sloppy reasoning, where one endorses entertaining an unclear thought while refusing to unpack and sharpen its meaning (or alternatively to discard it as meaningless cognitive noise). Disapproving of "attitude" in this sense can then be a moral or aesthetic or instrumental judgement (as in, "it is wrong for a human being to reduce their clarity of thought"; or "it is disgusting when one engages in avoidable sloppy cognition"; or "it is disadvantageous to compromise one's thinking skills by not exercising them in some situations"). Such judgments are not examples of "attitude", as they can be unpacked and clarified as needed.

tldr, but:

I don't think shorthand interpretations like these are accurate for most people who claim that JB sucks. Instead, I suspect most people who argue this are communicating some combination of (a) negative affect towards JB and (b) tribal affiliation with fellow JB haters. I've taken to referring to statements like these, that are neither preference claims nor empirical claims, as "attitude claims".

Did it ever occur to you that maybe they simply mean what they said? That JB's music is crappy music according to some standard? I know, far be it from a rationality community to focus on the rational communication presumably being made, instead focusing on "signalling" is what's in style for some stupid reason.

Same goes for:

"Atlas Shrugged is the best book ever written."

Which is a direct quote from a comment I made here long ago :)

EDIT: removed "objectively". I keep forgetting this word causes people's brains to explode.

Very interesting. I'm wondering if such a classification has been discussed before or is it mostly original research?

Do you think that the discussion quality (how does one measure it?) on this forum would be improved if the participants consciously considered their statement's taxonomy and clarified them to make their class as unambiguous as possible, or would it just make the discussion more cumbersome? For example, how do you classify your very first (meta-)claim: "None of them are falsifiable claims about the nature of reality." Is it an opinion?

There's already been some discussion on Less Wrong about what exactly it means for a claim to be meaningful. This post focuses on the negative definition of meaning: what sort of statements do people make where the primary content of the statement is non-empirical?

Here we go again..

if your are worried about non-empirical statements...Hey!..why not call them non-empirical staments. "Invisible undetectable gorilla" is meaningful by a number of robust and widely used definitions of "meaning".