Thursday, June 17, 2021

Logical Positivism Was Incorrectly Discarded

If logical positivism was a self-contradiction as claimed, then it would never even approximately apply. It can't be as if it were dark if the sun's out. There are no circles that appear to have corners. There are no bachelors who look married from certain angles. There's no fire that doesn't burn.

In reality there are many cases where logical positivism seems to apply.

Hence the self-contradiction disproof of logical positivism is itself self-contradictory.

In reality, if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it doesn't quack like a duck, it's not a duck. If you can't tell if it quacks or not, then a difference of no difference is no difference; ducks and not-ducks are identical, which means you screwed up the idea of [duck].

Existence is defined by interaction.

There is an issue with the usual phrasing.
However, you'll notice anti-positivists can't provide examples of the truths they receive without verification. There's no obverse to this [like a duck] principle. Rather, it's a social move: they're aware of unverifiable ingroup dogma, and feel the need to pre-emptively defend it. (Choosing to ingroup those without a fervid commitment to bullshit is right out.)

It seems as if positivism's verification principle cannot itself be verified, because the untrained have an impoverished understanding of the word [meaning].
Words are pointers. They don't have meaning, they are arbitrarily assigned a direction which points at some meaning.
Thus we must ask what [meaning] itself points to. Obviously, positivists use a kind of [meaning] that makes the verification principle a workable principle. Unless you can prove no such meaning exists, you've accomplished nothing. Since I just proved the opposite by contradiction, you may be looking a long time.

Usually positivists refer to carrying information. Carrying information refers to helping you make decisions. It helps you discriminate between good plans that uphold your values and bad plans that contravene them.

Again, if logical positivism had a contradiction disproof, it would be impossible to make [good, bad] plans. You would be unable to tell the difference.
(Set 1:) Being able to discriminate good from bad means meaning exists. Since meaning exists there's some statements that are meaningful and some which aren't. Since there's a difference, you can discriminate between meaningful statements and meaningless ones, and this discrimination is called "verification." Namely, you make a plan based on that meaning and see if it's a good plan [quacks], a bad plan[doesn't quack], or in fact meaningless [no difference between quacking and not-quacking] .
Basically, get fucked, communists. You're comically wrong, and anyone who listens to your epic bullshit deserves the resulting epic suffering.


P.S. "In 1967 philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes." Significantly, 1967 is after 1945, when science was nationalized by communist fanatics. The fact postwar scholars are against it is a strong point in its favour. 

P.P.S. You can see the homestuck principle at work with Karl Popper. He was promoted after 1945 for views he held before 1945. America produces enough ""scientists"" that anything a politician wants to do has already been justified by some scientist or another, so they can simply cherry-pick the useful ""authorities"" who will, of their own irrational free will, rubber-stamp what they wanted to do anyway.

2 comments:

jorgen said...

If the logical positivism movement approved of Einstein's erroneous theory of relativity, then they didn't really apply their own doctrine that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value. Einstein's theory if pure gobblygook.

Alrenous said...

No it isn't.