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A Five-Fold Skepticism in Logical Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Carlton W. Berenda
Carlton W. Berenda*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Extract

It is essentially a truism that the natural sciences have little or no place for dogmatism; to the contrary, there is an underlying skepticism pervading all scientific propositions. Any philosophy which pretends to provide an adequate philosophy of science, should, it seems to me, exhibit epistemologically a corresponding skepticism. At the very least, such a philosophy should demonstrate a skepticism in its views of the “truth” of scientific statements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1950 , pp. 123 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1950

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References

1a R. Carnap, Philos. of Sci. 3, 420; 4, 2.

1 H. Reichenbach, Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics; J. B. Rosser, Amer. J. Phys. 9, 207–212; J. B. Rosser & A. R. Turquette, J. of Symb. Log. 10, 61–82; E. L. Post, Am. J. of Math., 43, 163–185; J. Lukasiewicz & A. Tarski, Comptes Rendus d. Sc. 23, 30–50; J. Slupecki, Comptes Rendus d. Sc. 29, 9–11.

2 See also, Reichenbach, Elements of Symb. Logic, p. 183.

3 Elements of Symbolic Logic, pp. 182–191.

4 This was the subject of a paper given by the author to the Southwestern Philos. Conference, 1948, at Norman, Oklahoma.

5 For another important aspect of conventionalism, (in “correlation definitions”) see C. B. Weinberg, Philos. of Sc. 8, 506; & A. Pap: The A Priori in Physical Theory.

6 C. W. Berenda, Journ. of Philos. 39, 608. Whitehead's holistic universe of changing entities and laws (emergence) can serve as an attempt to explain away these paradoxes.

7 Ibid., p. 611.

8 P. Duhem, La Théorie Physique.

8a E. Nagel, Bulletin of East. Div. of A. P. A., Dec. 1948, p. 14.

9 These remarks have been applied to Cosmology. See C. W. Berenda, Journ. of Philos. 42, 545.

10 See C. B. Weinberg, Journ. of Philos. 35, 651; Philos. of Sc. 8, 506–509.

11 As counterpoint to the mystic's “verifiability”, there is the authoritarian political state's criterion that a verifiable theory must be one that serves the state practically as well as ideologically. See the present Soviet policy in support of Michurin-Lysenko genetics (really, neo-Lamarckian) as against Mendel-Morgan genetics, announced in Izvestia, Sept. 8, 1949. Science, 109, p. 90. As another, but fictitious example, see the amusing argument for the existence of the devil in A. Huxley's Ape and Essence, pp. 120–132, and especially p. 128, on scientific method.

12 See Harvey Fergusson, Modern Man, p. 237.

13 H. Fergusson, op. cit., p. 240.

14 As an immediate preliminary step, by formation of a world government as advocated by the United World Federalists.