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Did all positivists & empiricists err collapsing all *metaphysics into an epistemology of a materialist kind?
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The kind (of epistemology) founded only on after-the-fact physical knowledge, obtained, of course, from sensory observations &/or experiments?
One Response to “Did all positivists & empiricists err collapsing all *metaphysics into an epistemology of a materialist kind?”
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October 14th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
The materialism wasn’t the problem: it was the reductionism and (what is much the same thing) the verfication theory of knowledge.
The key point was that the logical positivists were looking for knowledge that could be supported: safe knowledge that could be established. Sense data can be established and they, thus, tried to “reduce” everything that we say to collections of hard facts about sense data. For example if we say something is hard what the logical positivists (actually in this example it was Peirce) said that MEANT is that if you picked it up and drew something harder across it then it would scratch. “The meaning of a statement is its method of verification”.
They soon came up against two major problems:
1. You can’t actually verify anything: you can only falsify it (copyright K R Popper).
2. You can’t reduce everything to reports of experience. SOME metaphysics has to creep in. Even the apparently ‘pure’ experiential statement ‘red spot now’ requires the concepts ‘colour’ ‘space’ and ‘time’, none of which can themselves be reduced to experientall statements.
Now many people have taken the failure of logical positivism to support a naive nativism or, worse, some mystical claptrap. The failure actually supports Popper and the Critical Rationalists.