Born in Austria to Jewish parents and fled the Nazis.
Books - Logic of Scientific Discovery - attacks --> empiricism and logical positivists
- Open Society and its Enemies - attacks --> tribalism, Plato (Hobbes and Marx) and Utopianism
- The Poverty of Historicism - attacks --> Marx and Hegel (anti-teleogical).
Logical Positivists
- Problem of the metaphysical and demarcation.
- Vienna Circle - Schlick and Neurath et al
- Reaction against romantic metaphysics
- Wanted to use science to clean up philosophy
- Statements that can't be verified = 'gibberish' --> metaphysical statements have no meaning - so cannot be verified.
Wittgenstein --> "Of that which we can not speak, we must remain silent".
Descartes is rejected --> "I think therefore I am" is REJECTED because it is non verifiable so it is 'gibberish'
Popper thought that in order to progress we needed to falsify things. By doing this we can then have proper knowledge. Theory of Induction - scientific theories couldn't be proved. He thought the logical positivists were wrong and what marked out science was its potential to be falsified. Popper believed that observation is always selective - we inherit the past - we cannot escape it.
Hume - problem with induction is that it is unreliable and Popper offered an acceptable solution to the problem of induction.
Einstein's theory of relativity was tested and passed, but if it had failed he would have had to give up the theory. This contrasts with the Freudians and the Marxists.
The Theory of Falsification - scientific principle which had been repeatedly tested was not necessarily true, it just hadn't been proved false.
No comments:
Post a Comment