Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The semantic tradition
- Part II Vienna, 1925–1935
- 9 Schlick before Vienna
- 10 Philosophers on relativity
- 11 Carnap before Vienna
- 12 Scientific idealism and semantic idealism
- 13 Return of Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 14 A priori knowledge and the constitution of meaning
- 15 The road to syntax
- 16 Syntax and truth
- 17 Semantic conventionalism and the factuality of meaning
- 18 The problem of induction: theories
- 19 The problem of experience: protocols
- Notes
- References
- Index
19 - The problem of experience: protocols
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The semantic tradition
- Part II Vienna, 1925–1935
- 9 Schlick before Vienna
- 10 Philosophers on relativity
- 11 Carnap before Vienna
- 12 Scientific idealism and semantic idealism
- 13 Return of Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 14 A priori knowledge and the constitution of meaning
- 15 The road to syntax
- 16 Syntax and truth
- 17 Semantic conventionalism and the factuality of meaning
- 18 The problem of induction: theories
- 19 The problem of experience: protocols
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The question concerning “protocol sentences,” their function and structure, is the new form in which philosophy … presents the problem of the ultimate foundation of knowledge.
Schlick, “Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis”… the problem of protocol statements … is the crucial problem of the logic of science (epistemology); in it lie also the problems usually treated under the catchword “empirical justification,” “test” or “verification.”
Carnap, “Über Protokollsätze”Our most sublime scientific knowledge, in the final analysis, has no other foundation than the facts admitted by common sense; if one puts in doubt the certainties of common sense, the entire edifice of scientific truth totters upon its foundations and tumbles down.
Duhem, The Evolution of MechanicsTraditionally, the notion of experience played two essential but distinguishable roles in the theory of knowledge: Experience functioned as the rock bottom of all empirical justification and as the key to the link between our beliefs and reality. Experience was the ultimate foundation of all empirical knowledge, and it was also our only guarantee that what we think we know has what Kant called “objective validity.” In this way our views of experience affected our views both on foundationalism and on realism.
Around 1930, a number of positivists began to question the adequacy of the foundationalist standpoint that had inspired much of traditional philosophy, and they detected a source of error in a certain doctrine of experience.
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- Information
- The Semantic Tradition from Kant to CarnapTo the Vienna Station, pp. 354 - 374Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991