"Logical positivism is a very attractive view for people who do not want to worry about what they cannot observe. It is ultimately a theory about meaning, about the content of a theory. According to the positivists, a theory says no more than its observable consequences. Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists. For if the content of a theory goes beyond what you can observe, then you can never, in principle, be sure that any theory is right. And that means there can be interminable arguments about which theory is right that cannot be settled by observation."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Tim Maudlin, "The Defeat of Reason", Boston Review (June 01, 2018)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Logical positivism
Logical positivism and logical empiricism, which together formed neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy that embraced verificationism, an approach that sought to legitimize philosophical discourse on a basis shared with the best examples of empirical sciences. In this theory of knowledge, only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful.
6 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Logical positivism →
Related Quotes
"Unlike the physicist, the psychologist ... investigates processes that belong to the same order—perception, learning,…"
"The difference between Hayek’s view and that of the logical positivists was that he moved in an idealist direction an…"
"To conclude, logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, …"
"Hayek thought there are two orders through which individuals consider the world: the sensory order and the physical o…"
":...Vienna is the origin of so many schools of its own which were dominant in the 1920s. And one of the most fundamen…"
"As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin’s criterio…"
"The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readil…"
"Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology ar…"
"The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstruc…"
"In Darwin's Black Box [1996], Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune sy…"