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Objective Knowledge in Science and the Humanities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Harold I. Brown
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Philosophy of science is still, in the minds of many, identified with positivism. This is understandable since twentieth century philosophy of science originates with the work of the Vienna Circle. Positivism is most famous for the verification theory of meaning, the doctrine that the meaning of any proposition is the method by which it is verified, and that any nonanalytic locution which cannot be proven or disproven by some empirical test has no cognitive significance. Positivism is an attempt to construct a “scientific philosophy” in the worst sense: it is maintained that (with the exception of propositions which are analytic and thus vacuous) only those propositions which occur in the sciences are meaningful, all other discourse having at best some emotive value, but no cognitive content, and all of this is maintained within the confines of an exceedingly narrow notion of scientific knowledge. This notion is so narrow that its advocates found themselves in danger of having to relegate most of physics to the realm of nonsense since physics contains many statements which are strictly universal and thus cannot be conclusively verified.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 25 , Issue 97 , June 1977 , pp. 85 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 With the benefit of hindsight we can expand this problem considerably. Consider a true universal proposition. Since it is true it cannot be falsified and since it is universal it cannot be verified, therefore it is meaningless. If it were false it would at least be falsifiable and thus meaningful. Similarly, from the point of view of logical form an existential proposition can be verified but never falsified, so all false universal statements become meaningless. In addition there is a variety of mixed statements, such as "There exists a metal which is always a gas at twenty degrees centigrade," which, by virtue of their form alone, can be neither verified nor falsified.

2 Perception, Theory, and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science, forth coming.

3 Translated as Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1968.

4 Note that this opens up the possibility that pre-Copernican theories such as Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian dynamics, as well as the later, much maligned phlogiston chemistry, are scientific.

5 Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 94.

6 Galileo, Dictlogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, p. 328.

7 This last point is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis. Cf. Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip Wiener, New York Atheneum, 1962, and Willard Van Orman Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," From a Logical Point of View, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1963.

8 The major figures in this group are Paul K. Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson, Errol E. Harris, Thomas S. Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Michael Polanyi, and Stephen Toulmin although the verson to be sketched does not coincide with the views of any one of these thinkers.

9 Paul K. Feyerabend, "Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism," Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, III, ed. Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1962.

10 The parallel between this distinction and Kant's distinction between a priori forms of intuition and categories, noumena, and phenomena is no coinci dence although I reject the claims that the categories are a priori and that the noumena are unknowable. Cf. my "Idealism, Empiricism, and Materialism," New Scholasticism, 47, 1973, pp. 311-323 and "Paradigmatic Propositions," American Philosophical Quarterly, 12, 1975, pp. 85-90, and Kuhn, Structure, pp. 111-112.

11 A detailed defense of this claim is possible although it requires a con siderably longer work than this paper.

12 Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," trans. Anthony Kerrigan, Fic cones, New York, Grove Press, 1962. The use of Borges story to illustrate my theory of objectivity can be taken as a further example of the kind of alternative interpretation with which I am concerned. It is clear that Borges reads his story as a metaphor on the structure of time.

13 Unfortunately, while the theory guarantees the existence of millions of copies of each of these books with only minor variations, it also guarantees the existence of an untold number of misleading catalogs and erroneous compendia and provides no criteria for distinguishing them. This means that in addition to empirical research the theory provides problems for further theoretical research too.