Hume's Fork

David Hume (1711-1776) took Gottfried Leibbniz's fork and added a prong.

Every Statement Can Be Put Into One Of Three Categories

1. True or False by definition.

2. Dependant on experience.

3. Nonsense

(1) The statement "1+1=2" is true by definition. The number '2' is just another way to express the statement '1 and another 1'; it doesn't add anything to the idea of '1 +1'.

(2) The statement "Bill Gates is rich" is based on experience, not logic. Bill Gates could be poor and still be Bill Gates. (While '1+1' could not equal '4' and still be '1+1')

(3) There are some things that don't fit into these two categories. These, according to Hume are stuff and nonsense. "Dragons fly" is not factual, and therefor a bad thing*.

Only the second category was worth looking at, as it is the only set of new, useful information. He called a piece of 'real knowledge' a synthetic statement.

This bit of nonsense started empiricism, notable for pointing out that the statement 'God exists' fell into the nonsense category.

Take a gander at Hume's Maxim.

*A quote from Hume on the subject nonsense and books containing such: "Commit it all then to flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".

And a P.S. to DrRetard; I think this would likely be considered nonsense because it is not saying that dragons could fly, it is saying that dragons do fly; the former is arrived at by the method you describe, while the later cannot be, nor can it be reached by any other deductive or observational achievement (as far as I know).

Put aside all the poor spelling, and you're still left with a lot of error.

First, "dragons fly" would not be an example of flame-bound nonsense for Hume -- after all, the idea of a dragon could be mentally constructed by reference to real-world experience involving lizards, flying, fire, and the like. The kind of statements Hume targets as meaningless are the type that can neither be traced back to experience nor given a mere conceptual gloss -- "there is a causal connection between certain events", "there is a substantive self", etc.

Second, the terminology of "synthetic" statements doesn't come from Hume. I believe it comes from Kant.

Third, you're calling Hume's Fork itself "nonsense" for no apparent reason.

Fourth, Hume's Fork did not spawn empiricism, for goodness sake. Empiricism goes back at least to Aristotle. Hume's Fork helped spawn logical positivism, a radical offshoot of empiricism. After all, why would empiricism pronounce "God exists" to be nonsense, given that Christian philosopher John Locke was a prominent empiricist? Why would empiricism pronounce anything to be nonsense, when it's not even a theory of meaning?

Dolt.