Elements of Epistemology

	Chapter I Socrates and Plato
	Chapter II Corpus Aristotelicum
	Chapter III Weeping and Laughing Philosophers
	Chapter IV Stoicism and Skepticism
	Chapter V Scholastic Epistemology
	Chapter VI Roger and Francis Bacons
	Chapter VII Cosmology and Epistemology
	Chapter VIII Classic Protagonists of Epistemology
	Chapter IX The Sociologists
	Chapter X Galactic Stage of Cosmological Argument
	Chapter XI Logical Positivism and Beyond ...
	Chapter XII Visual Statistics in Search of Meaning

Logical Positivism

Methodology of science is hard to reconcile with metaphysical or religious speculations, as these beliefs are usually encapsulated, the religious systems are closed and dogmatic and such argumentation is a waste of time.

The main tenets of logical positivism pertain to the meaningfulness and verifiability of statements.

Stars of science  The founder of logical positivism was Ernst Mach. Three stars of science guided Mach's epistemology:

         parsimony

         reality

         methodology

Ernst Mach is today perhaps best known for the Mach Number, a ratio of the speed of an object to the speed of sound, with Mach One (758 mph) separating subsonic and supersonic speeds. However, a more fundamental contribution to science is his theory of scientific philosophy.

Around the turn of the century Mach was one of the most visible and well-known scientists. He exercised influence even on Vladimir Lenin who wrote his Materialism and Empiriocriticism as a polemic with Mach. Mach taught mathematics, physics and philosophy at universities in Prague and Vienna. He maintained that the more we know about something, the more concise we can be explaining it. In this he echoed Blaise Pascal who ended one of his letters to a friend
 

Forgive me that this letter is so long,
I was too busy to make it short.

Mach's principle of parsimony is close to that of Occam's razor. As Occam, he maintains that the principle of parsimony excludes theology from being a science. Theology's assumption of God as an explanatory construct is not parsimonious. Mach hoped that with the realization of the principle of parsimony the mystical and the religious would disappear.

Mach made the principle of parsimony a guiding principle of science. Science should strive for minimal theories with maximal explanatory power. Quantitative methods should be used to express our inner world. By creating permanent knowledge we should be able to transcend our own existence. His message to a true scientist is:

Do not look for the dubious immortality in the afterlife.
You can continue your conscious self by merging your cognitive structures with the positive culture of the humankind.

Death of the Professor The apostle of logical positivism was Moritz Schlick, who founded, in 1924, the Vienna Circle (initially called the Ernst Mach Association), to promulgate logical positivism. Based on writings of Ernst Mach, logical positivism, also known as logical empiricism, underlies modern scientific inquiry. Among the members of the Vienna Circle were Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, and Gottlob Frege. On June 22, 1936, Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was ascending the staircase of philosophers to deliver his last lecture of the spring semester. Waiting on the staircase was one of his students, Johann Nelbck, who pulled a gun and killed him. Schlick had failed Nelbck in his class and slept with Nelbck's wife. Although from a family of German Protestant nobility, Schlick was characterized in the press as a Jew. This event ended the existence of the Vienna Circle, but not its legacy.

Rudolf Carnap  Semantic, logic and the philosophy of science Rudolf Carnap, professor at Prague's Emperor Charles IV University, University of Chicago and at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on the mutual relationships between semantic, logic, and epistemology. He wrote numerous books on this subject, such as The Logical Structure of the World (1928), Introduction to Semantics (1942), and Logical Foundations of Probability (1950).

 Bertrand Russell Another major theoretician of logical positivism was Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Bertrand Russell was a mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize winner. Throughout his life, Russell showed rigor in his analyses, openness to ideas, and aversion to dogma. He was in prison twice. The first time in 1918 for opposing the WW I, the second time in 1961 for opposing nuclear weapons. Russell thought that it might be possible to decompose narratives into their component statements, verifiable by empirical observation, reason, and logic. Let's illustrate Russell's epistemology by contrasting the Aristotelian (provable) and Peripatetic (improvable) syllogisms.

The Peripatetic syllogism, containing the statement 'All humans are mortal,' invokes an unknowable future and is thus improvable.

In his History of Western Philosophy (1946), Bertrand Russell writes that

Between science and religion, between what we know and what we do not know, is a no-mans-land. This no-mans-land is philosophy.'

The natural sciences do not provide grounds for belief in God or personal immortality. Religion is not an indispensable component of human existence, but morality and humanism is.

Angels and demons Logical positivism divides statements into three principal categories. A priori analytic sentences express relationships that are verifiable by the rules of formal logic. A posteriori synthetic sentences are verifiable by using the rules of scientific inquiry. There are also a priori synthetic sentences. These metaphysical sentences cannot be verified, but their meaning can be experienced. Statements within the realm of literature, poetry, and art frequently communicate feelings and are legitimate means for sharing our experiences as human beings. The claims of truth-values for a priori synthetic sentences in the sense of science and not that of literature are intellectually dishonest. These metaphysical statements are not verifiable and all disputes about their truth or falsity are senseless. To argue about truth or falsity of statements that do not permit verification is a waste of time. Examples of metaphysical statements are 'there are angels' or 'the devil does not exist.' These sentences cannot be proved or disproved, they are meaningless.

Mach's detractors  

Hermann Bahr, one of Mach's early admirers and later his enemy, in his Dialogue About Tragedy criticizes Mach by using the following line of reasoning. Reason dethroned old Gods as well as our Earth. Now it also threatens to destroy us. We have to realize that the foundation of our life is not truth, but illusion. I, personally, do not care what is or is not true. I care most about what I need. This Great Truth Controversy is so pervasive that it is likely embedded in the personalities of its proponents and detractors. Scientists tend to pursue truth, moralists tend to pursue power. This was well understood by another Mach's antagonist, Emile Durkheim.

Emile Durkheim   To Durkheim, religion is the projection of the power of society. However, the main enemy of logical positivism was Karl Popper.

Karl Popper,  a vocal critic of logical positivism, gained notoriety with publication of (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, where he rejected the concept of history that aims at discovery of historical trends. Popper's (1934) Logik der Forschung (Logic of scientific discovery) was criticized as being only a restatement of Kantian synthetic a priori propositions and their quid facti verity. One of Popper's acolytes, Cyril Hoschl, (in his speech at Prague's Carolinum, May 25, 1994) claimed that "Sir Karl Raimund Popper, C.H., K.T., M.A., Ph.D., D.LITT, F.R.S., F.B.A. is the most eminent living philosopher of science." 

A different view of Popper was voiced by the British philosopher David Papineau.

David Papineau reviewed Malachi Haim Hacohen's (2000) book Karl Popper: the formative years for the The New York Times (November 12, 2000). Papineau praises Hacohen's 600 pp. volume on Popper and concludes that by Hacohen's own account,

"Popper was a moral prig."

Martin Gardner in his article A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper (Skeptical Inquirer, July, 2001) writes that

I am convinced that Popper, a man of enormous egotism, was motivated by an intense jealousy of Carnap. It seems that every time Carnap expressed an opinion, Popper felt compelled to come forth with an opposing view. Popper's great and tireless efforts to expunge the word induction from scientific and philosophical discourse have utterly failed. Except for a small but noisy group of British Popperians, induction is just too firmly embedded in the way philosophers of science and even ordinary people talk and think.

David Stove  For incisive criticism of Popper you may consult David Stove's Popper and after: four modern irrationalists (the other three being Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Kuhn, know for his (1962) Structure of scientific revolutions, (mocked in Frank & Ernest comic strip showing a chick breaking out of its shell, looking around, and saying, Oh, wow! Paradigm shift!)

Armand Ringe's Clerihew  Armand T. Ringe composed the following clerihew on Popper who believed that he, Karl Popper, single-handedly destroyed the philosophical tenets of logical positivism and who was exalted by his protagonists as the England's greatest philosopher of science since Bertrand Russell:

Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.

Beyond logical positivism...

Stephen Jay Gould  (1941-2002)

Gould's Nonoverlapping Magisteria  The nonoverlapping magisteria is phrase coined by Stephen Jay Gould in his (1999) book Rocks of Ages where he argues that the question of God's existence cannot be settled by scientific methods. Gould maintains that

Richard Dawkins' God Delusion  Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion (2006)  answers Gould's claims as follows: