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2.0 out of 5 stars
another positivist failure., May 12, 2005
I never understood why Karl Popper had achieved such respect among scholars. I can certainly appreciate his criticism of the empiricist verifiability theory of meaning. The logical positivists had sought to bring science and philosophy into a cohesive discipline -- certainly a respectable goal. Yet by 1935, the verifiability criterion was dogged by powerful criticism. Popper himself was aware of these problems. Popper wisely observes that "the radical positivist would destroy not only metaphysics, but also natural science." For instance, scientific laws are not a composite of all observed cases. They are generalizations that hold for _all_ cases, observed and unobserved, whether taking place now, or in the past, or in the future. But such a law, like the law of gravity, is on the positivist's own ground unverifiable and therefore meaningless. For the positivist, with his esteem for science, this was damning.
The verifiability theory was in trouble. Popper's solution, however, is hardly adequate. He knew that universal statements of scientific law were meaningful even though they could not be verified. Thus he proposed that it was not verifiability that determined meaningfulness, but _falsifiability_. If we say "All roses are red," this would be meaningful, because it is falsifiable by the experience of finding a rose colored differently. However, the asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability completely unravels Popper's case. You could _never_ falsify a logically particular statement (like "Some ravens are black"), because such would require a universal negative ("No ravens are black") -- a proposition that could never be proven on empiricist terms. On Popper's own terms, "Some ravens are black" would be a meaningless statement. This can hardly be what he anticipated.
Hopefully this whole empiricist zeitgeist will die off. It irks me bad.
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