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A Critique Of Popper’s Strategy For The Growth Of Science
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1.2 THE VIENNA CIRCLE’S ATTACK ON METAPHYSICS
The
logical positivists in the spirit of inductive tradition held that
science is fundamentally based on the accumulation of facts. However
they made a dogmatic extrapolation by holding a naïve and naturalistic
view of meaning in their verification principle. For them, the genuine
character and the meaningfulness of any alleged proposition is
determined by its being a truth function of, or its being reducible to,
elementary (or atomic) proposition expressing observations or
perceptions. Carnap articulates this somewhat lopsided position of the
positivists in a fascinating fashion:
It is certain that a string of
words has meaning only if its derivability relations from protocol
sentences (observation sentences) are given…that is to say, if the way
to (its) verification… is known.9
The meaning of a statement is,
thus, the method of its verification they concluded, to use the
expressions of Waisman.10 The result of this unacceptable position of
the Positivists is that the metaphysical sentences stand revealed, by
logical analysis, as pseudo- sentences. The propositions of metaphysics
are dismissed by them as non-sensical, and so lack any relevance and
force in the ensemble of gnoseological acquisitions. This is indeed a
calculated strategy towards a complete destruction of metaphysical
principles. They have become ipso facto avowed worshippers in the temple
of that Humean ideology in which metaphysics is viewed as ‘nonsensical
twaddle, sophistry and illusion,’ requiring to be committed to the
flames.11
Popper in his unpublished book entitled Die beiden Grund
probleme der Erkenntnisthorie12, gave a fairly detailed criticism of
this doctrine of elimination or overthrow (ueberwindung) of metaphysics
through meaning-analysis. This anti-current action was done, not from a
metaphysical framework, but from the springboard of one whose interest
is in science, and its unhampered growth and advancement. Popper
observed that this doctrine far from defeating the supposed enemy,
brought the keys of the beleaguered city to the beck and call of the
alleged enemy.13 The proponents were so much fixated in their
determination to oust metaphysics from the circle of all informative
discipline that they failed to realize that most of the scientific
theories, which they purport to shield, have also fallen on the same
scrap heap as the ‘meaningless’ propositions of metaphysics. Should this
position of theirs be taken in the least lightly, their efforts towards
the radical annihilation of metaphysics would also be an effort towards
the eclipse of science as most of the postulations of the later which
have metaphysical features would be destroyed simultaneously. It is an
established fact that scientific laws and theories, which appear in the
form of universal propositions, transcend experience and so are
incapable of being logically reduced to the elementary statements of
experience. Were we to hold credence to the Positivists’ criterion of
meaning and apply such a criterion in a way that is consistent, we shall
in the final analysis jettison the natural laws, which are, as Einstein
says, the supreme task of the physicist,14 from the sphere of
meaningful propositions. They can never be welcome into the community of
all genuine or legitimate statements.
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