A J Ayer & Karl Popper

[AndrewJ]

Some years ago I read "Language, Truth and Logic", Ayer's read-on-the-bus tour de force on logical positivism. I have since read an introduction to Karl Popper (i.e. falsification) and their approach got me interested in the value of maths and pure science which had once seemed cold and hostile. I am interested to know if any subsequent thinkers have written anything in a similar vein. Has anyone significantly challenged Ayer and Popper's ideas regarding scientific method?

[mugaliens]

Interesting. However, by it's nature, it sticks more to the what, than the why, as metaphysics is rejected by logical positivism.

The beauty of Ayers' work is that it allows us to dismiss with the unknowable insofar as there's work to be done, relegating it instead to curious pursuits of interest and pasttime.

You asked about other works. One reader wrote: "While this book is of tremendous historical importance, its philosophical content should be evaluated only after one has read Brand Blanshard's _Reason and Analysis_, which put paid to the misbegotten "verifiability theory of meaning" and demonstrated once for all that logical positivism could not pass its own tests."

[Disinfo Agent]

Has anyone significantly challenged Ayer and Popper's ideas regarding scientific method?Plenty of philosophers have. But of course it's easy to challenge anything philosophically. I don't know of any mathematicians.

Popper himself had an interest on the foundations of mathematics, namely Alfred Tarski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tarski)'s work on logic.

[AndrewJ]

Heartening to find some fellow Ayerites out there!



You asked about other works. One reader wrote: "While this book is of tremendous historical importance, its philosophical content should be evaluated only after one has read Brand Blanshard's _Reason and Analysis_, which put paid to the misbegotten "verifiability theory of meaning" and demonstrated once for all that logical positivism could not pass its own tests."

When you read Ayer the concern that his "verifiability theory of meaning" cannot itself be verified (and is thus, by his definitions, meaningless) pretty much screams out at you. My feeling is that if you swap Ayer's "verifiability" for Poppers "falsification" and throw out all metaphysics then you have a fairly sturdy philosophical foundation without needing to wade through formal logic or Kant or the Greeks. However, I shall read up on Brand Blanshard.

If no mathematicians have seriously criticised Popper's theory on scientific method can we conclude that his ideas constitute the mainstream?

[Ivan Viehoff]

TS Kuhn wrote a rather different analysis of scientific method from Popper, and is, or at least has been seen as being, in opposition to Popper. In my view, he was not in opposition to Popper, and his work was never intended as a replacement for it, but it was substantially seen that way at the time, and built up as such. In my view it is a sociology of how scientists do science, rather than a philosophy of scientific method. Popper was not a very good publicist, rather crabby and bad-tempered, so he tended not to do well in public debate with Kuhn, and was seen as having "lost" the debate at the time. I think looking back now that Popper is dead and the dust has settled, I think we can see more clearly that Kuhn was not proposing an alternative, and Popper's own ideas are re-established as mainstream now. There is a little book called Kuhn vs Popper (Steve Fuller) you can read about this.

There are others who disagree with Popper for other reasons. But sadly in the only other attempted critique I have read, it became evident that the author, although supposedly writing a textbook on philosophy of science, actually didn't understand it, and his purported replacement for it was actually an analysis of a different problem.

I agree with Popper himself that his theory of scientific method is not so much a brilliant insight as a logical necessity. When he came up with it, he initially assumed it was common knowledge.

I confess I don't know much about Ayer.

[jokergirl]

Isn't there a rather interesting-to-read letter exchange between Popper and Einstein published somewhere? I sadly never picked it up, though.

;)