The positivist dislikes the idea that there should be meaningful problems outside the field of ‘positive’ empirical science—problems to be dealt with by a genuine philosophical theory. He dislikes the idea that there should be a genuine theory of knowledge, an epistemology or a methodology. He wishes to see in the alleged philosophical problems mere ‘pseudo-problems’ or ‘puzzles’. Now this wish of his—which, by the way, he does not express as a wish or a proposal but rather as a statement of fact—can always be gratified. For nothing is easier than to unmask a problem as ‘meaningless’ or ‘pseudo’. All you have to do is to fix upon a conveniently narrow meaning for ‘meaning’, and you will soon be bound to say of any inconvenient question that you are unable to detect any meaning in it. Moreover, if you admit as meaningful none except problems in natural science, any debate about the concept of ‘meaning’ will also turn out to be meaningless. The dogma of meaning, once enthroned, is elevated forever above the battle. It can no longer be attacked. It has become (in Wittgenstein’s own words) ‘unassailable and definitive’. [29-30]
The meaninglessness of a criterion of meaning
- By PeterM in .Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
-
10 December 2014
Tags
authority
critical rationalism
criticism
demarcation
democracy
discussion
education
enlightenment
experiment
explanation
fact
falsifiability
falsification
freedom
freedom of speech
hypothesis testing
induction
justification
knowledge
Kuhn
learning
liberty
logic
method
morality
objective knowledge
objectivity
open society
opinion
philosophy
politics
Popper
power
problems
progress
rational discussion
rationality
religion
science
scientism
society
statistics
theory
truth
World 3
Authors
- .Adams, John (1)
- Journal (1)
- .Adorno, Theodor W. et al. (1)
- .Agassi, Joseph (1)
- .Albert, Hans (28)
- .Albert/Popper (1)
- Briefwechsel (1)
- .Andersson, Gunnar (3)
- .Bacon, Francis (3)
- New Organon (3)
- .Banerjee, Abhijit and Esther Duflo (1)
- Poor Economics (1)
- .Benn, Tony (1)
- .Bergson, Henri (1)
- .Blackburn, Simon (1)
- Truth (1)
- .Boghossian, Peter (1)
- .Bronowski, Jacob (8)
- .BVerfG (1)
- “KPD-Verbot” (1)
- .Byrnes, Sholto (1)
- .Churchill, Winston (1)
- .Cockburn, Patrick (1)
- .Colquhoun, David (1)
- .Cox, Brian (4)
- .Dahrendorf, Ralf (5)
- .Darwin, Charles (4)
- .Dawkins, Richard (1)
- .Dawkins/Law (1)
- .Deutsch, David (45)
- .Dewey, John (2)
- .Dryzek, John S. (1)
- .Eidlin, Fred (1)
- .Einstein, Albert (1)
- .Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1)
- .Enserink, Martin (1)
- .Ferrone, Vincenzo (1)
- .Feyerabend, Paul (2)
- Against Method (2)
- .Feyerabend/Albert (2)
- Briefwechsel (2)
- .Feynman, Richard (5)
- .Fisher, R.A. (7)
- .Fuller, Steve (10)
- Kuhn vs. Popper (10)
- .Gadenne, Volker (1)
- .Gladwell, Malcolm (1)
- .Goldacre, Ben (2)
- Bad Science (2)
- .Goodin, Robert (4)
- .Gould, Stephen Jay (6)
- .Grayling, A.C. (6)
- .Harris, Sam (3)
- .Hitchens, Christopher (1)
- .Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (4)
- .Hume, David (3)
- .Jarvie, Ian (17)
- .Jörke, Dirk (1)
- .Kant, Immanuel (1)
- .Kiesewetter, Hubert (2)
- .Kohl, Helmut (1)
- .Krugman, Paul (1)
- .Kuhn, Thomas (1)
- .Lakatos, Imre (1)
- .Laudan, Larry (1)
- .Lipton, Peter (1)
- .Livio, Mario (1)
- .Lockhart, Paul (2)
- .Magee, Bryan (5)
- .Medawar, Peter (4)
- .Meehl, Paul E. (5)
- .Mill, John Stuart (35)
- On Liberty and Utilitarianism (35)
- “On Liberty” (32)
- “Utilitarianism” (3)
- On Liberty and Utilitarianism (35)
- .Morgenstern/Zimmer (1)
- Karl Popper (1)
- .Mosley, Michael and John Lynch (2)
- .Nagel, Thomas (1)
- .Newton, Roger G. (3)
- .Notturno, Mark (20)
- .Paine, Thomas (1)
- .Papineau, David (1)
- .Pies, Ingo (1)
- .Pinker, Steven (1)
- .Popper, Karl (162)
- “Replies to my Critics” (2)
- After The Open Society (2)
- All Life is Problem Solving (3)
- Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt (8)
- Conjectures and Refutations (23)
- “Back to the Presocratics” (1)
- “Humanism and Reason” (1)
- “Public Opinion and Liberal Principles” (1)
- “Science: Conjectures and Refutations” (5)
- “Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance” (4)
- “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science” (1)
- “Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge” (4)
- “Utopia and Violence” (3)
- “What is Dialectic?” (1)
- Logik der Forschung (1)
- Objective Knowledge (19)
- Realism and the Aim of Science (4)
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery (36)
- The Myth of the Framework (19)
- The Open Society and Its Enemies (37)
- The Poverty of Historicism (2)
- Unended Quest (6)
- .Popper, Karl and John C. Eccles (11)
- .Porter, Roy (2)
- .Russell, Bertrand (2)
- .Sagan, Carl (11)
- .Schank, Roger (1)
- .Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.) (1)
- .Shearmur, Jeremy (2)
- .Shirky, Clay (1)
- .Singer, Peter (1)
- .Sloman/Fernbach (1)
- .Smolin, Lee (1)
- .Soros, George (1)
- Open Society (1)
- .Stelter, Brian (1)
- .The Julian Assange Show (1)
- .Trotsky, Leon (1)
- .Vollmer, Gerhard (1)
- .Waschkuhn, Arno (2)
- .Weil, Simone (3)
- .Wilson, Edward O. (1)
- Consilience (1)
- .Zimmer, Mirjam (1)
Recent Comments