Lecture 41 03 05 08 Logical Positivism Analytic

Lecture 41 03 -05 -08 • Logical Positivism & Analytic Philosophy • The main model in Logical Positivism: Inductive Verificationism. • Explanation The alignment of the description under a logically coherent theory or law: Falling objects are instances of the law of gravitation. • Description The description of facts according to established parameters: objects fall at at 16’/sec 2 • Observation The empirical determination of fact ; objects fall • The overarching problem: What assumptions are already built into the three levels?

Karl Popper: Falsification • Wittgenstein: We just don’t recognize how complicated is the statement, ‘I know, ’ which seems to guarantee the statement as true, as a fact. We always forget the expression, ‘I thought I knew. ’ • Hume: All empirical or matter of fact knowledge can be ascertained only within statistical approximations. • Karl Popper: The Logic of Discovery (1934): the falsifiability criterion. If you cannot falsify a statement, it cannot be scientific, and once it is falsified, you have to reject it. • When science changes, what changes? • If the status of what we accepted as true, as knowledge changes, what evaluation can we give?

What did the (positivist) study of the history of science actually show? • The “Text Book Tradition”: the version of the history in the narrative part of science textbooks. • In effect, amateur historiography, for an image of science drawn by scientists themselves from “the study of finished scientific achievements” • They typically yield a picture of science as an constituted by what current practitioners do, as each scientist adds elements to a “constellation” of “facts, theories and methods” incrementally developed by a “piecemeal process”. • This folk-lore like representation has a teleology: the history is the overcoming of supersition and error, until you arrive at The Truth (which is contained in the textbook you are reading, and confirmed by the lab exercises and problem sets you must solve to pass the class).

The starting point for analysis: NORMAL SCIENCE • P. 10: “In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. ” • Such achievements implicitly “define he legitimate problems and methods of a research field for subsequent generations” because of two characteristics: • 1. The achievement is sufficiently unprecedented to attract an “enduring group” of adherents away from a competing practice; and • 2. it is “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. ”

“Paradigm” • It’s a term from linguistics: a verb paradigm, a model, like –er or –re verbs in French, or Latin, amäre, to love -ö -ämus amö I love amämus we -äs -ätis amäs you amätis you -at -ant amat he amant they In brief, a paradigm is a model or pattern, applicable to a wide range of other cases.

From the Postscript • Two main senses: • Disciplinary matrix: “The whole constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by members of a given community. ” • Concrete Exemplar: exemplary past achievements, “The concrete puzzle solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science. ”

The text book tradition & revolutions • The folklore history built into many science textbooks assumes continuity, • TRUTH • discoveries • Ignorance & error • Study this book, and we will bring you into the realm of Scientific Truth, achieved by The Scientific Method.