I have previously discussed one of the methodological debates between the likes of Betrand Russell, Henri Poincare, and indirectly, Ludwig von Mises (whose brother ironically was a positivist).
Geordie Rose (who should blog more often, see his mullet post here) pointed to an interesting interview from the latest print edition of New Scientist. It is with physicist David Deutsch and is certainly worth the quick read. Below is one of the quotes that caught my eye:
Logical positivism is a form of solipsism. If you say physics is only about predicting the outcomes of experiments, you can only really say it’s about experiments that you personally do, because to you any other person is just another thing you’re observing. But solipsism is a dead-end philosophy and when it comes to science it’s a poison. It doesn’t allow further progress from existing theories, and that’s why I think applications of quantum theory, particularly quantum computation, were overlooked for decades. You could say people didn’t really think the theory was true because they had rejected the idea of truth in science. Truth in science must mean correspondence to reality, or it means nothing.
More on the fallacious philosophy of logical positivism: 1 2 3
Deutsch is a bit confused. Solipsism is the view that only the existence of the self can be verified. Deutsch is making one of two claims:
(1)Positivists were solipsists.
(2)Positivists should have been solipsists, given their beliefs.
(1) is simply false. (2) is true only if positivists assumed that dualism is true. But if positivists that assumed dualism is true then they wouldn’t have been positivists. So positivists did not assume that dualism is true. Therefore (2) is false.
I think Deutsch is confuting methodological solipsism (like that of Carnap) for and solipsism per se.
In any case, I don’t understand why Austrians keep bringing up logical positivism. They are beating a dead horse. No philosopher (that I know of) defends the verifiability criterion of meaning. Perhaps they do this because it leads attention away from the fact that hardly any modern epistemological doctrine takes the vague, messy, and unjustified proposals of Kantianism seriously.
Comment by Mean Gene the Machine — 1/5/2007 @ 10:43 pm