Logical Positivism and Science: Examining their Relationship

For many years philosophers have debated on the nature of science, its uses, how it should be conducted, and influence on society, however, the first to do so were the Ancient Greeks. In what is science essay this topic will be considered. 

Aristotle and Plato were considered to be the first philosophers of science. However they had opposing views, Plato had the belief that humanity was born with a knowledge of everything, and that this was innate in every person. Aristotle, however believed that Plato was wrong, and that knowledge could only be gained by comparing what is already to known to the real world using observations. The difference between these two beliefs could be considered to be the birth of the Philosophy of Science. Over the years, in particular after the scientific revolution of the 16th-18th century, many great Philosophers of Science have expanded on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, creating their own schools of thought. The purpose of this essay science paper is to act as a review and discussion of the different schools of thought in the philosophy of science as well as their application in paleontology, and finally to create a framework through which the question “What is science for?” can be answered.

In the early 20th century an approach to science known as logical positivism came about, and eventually evolved into logical empiricism, a less radical form of the same beliefs. The beliefs of logical positivists were based on a general theory of language, which featured two main ideas, the analytic-syntactic distinction and the verifiability theory of meaning. A sentence like “Some bachelors are doctors” is a synthetic one, and the sentence “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, that is to say, the first sentence is true or false, in both meaning and how the world actually is, whereas the second sentence is an undeniable truth. Logical positivists had an important application for this, they believed that mathematics and logic is analytic, which makes it possible to deal with these things in an empirical framework, logical positivists claimed that, while synthetic claims can be expressed mathematically, proofs and investigations within maths are analytic, and when broken down into small enough steps, each step will be logical and unsurprising. The verifiability theory of meaning principle states that to know the meaning of a sentence we must be able to verify it through observation, and a sentence that is unverifiable is meaningless. 

The most prominent logical positivists (later empiricists) were the members of the Vienna Circle, which started as a discussion group in a café in Vienna around 1907. It was formally formed post world war I in Vienna. Logical positivists were inspired by new developments in science, particularly the work of Einstein and thought that they could put together an empiricist philosophy to solve the problems that philosophy had been concerned with, through the use of logic and language. Logical positivists in particular believed in both types of logic, inductive and deductive, however they were strongly focused on developing their inductive logic, as they argued that the evidence found in science did not have the kind of guarantees that were found in deductive logic; They embraced that error is always a possibility. Logical positivists coined the idea of context of discovery vs context of justification, and believed that science is legitimized by the verification of ideas, which meant that they disregarded history and biography. Logical positivists believed that the aim and purpose of science was to create a map of experiences and to be able to anticipate them, however none of this could be guaranteed, and they maintained that there was always risk for error.

Attempting to apply the beliefs of Logical Positivists on paleontology yields some interesting results, as discussed in the presentation on Taxonomy in the first week of tutorials, we can see that paleontologists do use some of the principles proposed by logical positivists. They make observations and use factual statements to create papers, however they make large amounts of assumptions due to lack of evidence in their field. It is also questionable as to whether or not a logical positivist would consider the evidence presented by paleontologists as valid, as it is impossible to empirically observe an extinct animal. Also, as was explored in the presentation on imaging during the same week, in paleontology it is important to take context of discovery into account, which logical positivists did not believe should be important. It can be argued that a logical positivist would not consider paleontology to be a science, however paleontologists do use some of the methods that were argued for by logical positivists, such as induction and deduction. The issues with logical positivism are best explained by this quote “the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”

An alternate school of thought was introduced by Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher who was active in Vienna around the same time as the logical positivists. Popper was in disagreement with the ideas put forward by logical positivists, his theory of science did not draw on the same concepts as the logical positivists, who developed their theories about science from language, meaning and logic. Popper aimed to understand science. Popper’s first idea was to create a method capable of separating science from pseudoscience, he did this through a method of falsification which he defined as “statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations”. This meant that for a statement to be considered scientific there had to be a feasible way to disprove it. An example of a non-scientific statement was given by Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World, in which he proposes a hypothetical situation where he tells someone that he has an invisible, fire breathing dragon in his garage, and each time that person attempts to create a test to prove the presence of the dragon, he adds more properties to the dragon to make it impossible to disprove his claim. This had an important implication, as it meant that according to Popper, a scientific theory cannot be established by proving it with observations, essentially stating that confirmation is a myth, and that it is only possible to disprove a theory through observation.

Popper also had developed a theory on how science changes, sating hat it occurs in two steps. The first step being conjecture: A hypothesis that attempts to describe some part of the natural world. He believed that a good conjecture should be bold, and take risks. The second step in this process is refutation: the hypothesis is subject to testing and attempts to disprove it. Popper believed that science progress through trial by error, and that a good theory is one that is able to withstand more tests, not necessarily one that is more truthfu;. Popper’s aim for science was to bring scientists together to work as an open minded community who were unafraid of being wrong, or disproven, and to help science to progress as quickly as possible, even though there might be no truth at the end. 

While there is much criticism of Popper’s theories, particularly related to holism (due to the number of assumptions being made when testing a theory) , Popper’s idea of scientific progress can clearly be seen in the history of paleontology, an example can be seen from the presentation given in the second week of tutorials “Fossils in the Age of Revolution and Reform”, in which Cuvier (Who was known as the founding father of paleontology) “falsified” the theory that fossils belonged to animals which had not been discovered by suggesting that an animal such as the wooly mammoth was so large that surely if it existed it would have been seen or reported by humans, which made the theory of extinction become more commonly accepted. Cuvier also used some empirical evidence to prove his belief, comparing the jaw of a mammoth and an elephant to prove that they are different species. However even this goes against Popper’s theories as he believed that a good scientist is one that is open to change, and he would likely not support the idea of person A creating a theory and person B disproving it, unless they were working together, as it would mean that either, person A is not open to change, or person B is doing it to be malicious towards person A.

To conlude what is science essay, logical positivists believed that in a scientific discussion, each sentence must be verifiable, and they argued that much of traditional philosophy, ethics, and theology consisted of meaningless statements, and was, therefore, meaningless. In short, logical positivists saw science as a more complex version of reasoning and logic that is used in everyday life, and should be separated from traditional philosophy.