Logical positivists

To sum it up, the logical positivists considered scientific knowledge as a two-level structure. The lower level is that observation, the upper level is that of theory, and the two are connected by correspondence rules. The sentences on the lower and the upper level are synthetic, the sentences which connect the two levels are analytic. 

So the breakdown of the distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic on the one hand, and the observational and the theoretical on the other hand destroys the nice architecture of the logical positivist view. In the original picture one could clearly mark off the conceptual scheme both from the particular claims that can be expressed in its terms and from the content it organizes. Now these three things seem to be lumped together as an amorphous whole. 

Yet, it was exactly on the ruins of the logical positivist conception that a new notion of conceptual scheme has arisen. A new notion, which has affinities not only with the logical positivist view, but also with the Kantian and the historical-... 

Before moving on to (IR3), it is useful to contrast the ideas behind (IR2) with related approaches, the logical positivists and Dummett s verificationism. According to logical positivism, all synthetic sentences should be verifiable, at least in principle, on the basis of experience unverifiable sentences are meaningless. The view developed above differs from this in two respects. First, it is not committed empiricism, so it does not constrain admissible verifications in the way logical positivism does. If it turns out that mathematics is synthetic a priori, as Kant believed, that is perfectly acceptable. The justification conditions which determine... 

The Greatest Logical Positivist. In Realism with a Human Face, 268-277. 

The classical notion of reduction in the philosophy of science, which originated with the Unified Science program of the logical positivists, had the following characteristics (Levy, 1979) ... 

Hence, for the received Kant a necessary requirement of proper science is its tie to metaphysics and mathematics. The idea that proper science uses mathematics has continued to the present day, though the metaphysics has been dropped. To put it crudely, the logical positivists threw out metaphysics, replacing it by logic and aligning the latter with mathematics as the metaphysical foundation of all proper science.10... 

Comtean positivism was distinct from the late nineteenth-century positivism of Ernst Mach or that of the Vienna Circle logical positivists, for in Comte s work there were distinct realist impulses superadded to the dominating desire to extirpate metaphysics. Moreover, Comte actually had a healthy respect for the beneficial role of hypotheses in... 

The school of British Empiricism of John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776) continued on from the foundations laid by Bacon. It was perhaps no accident that Locke was a medical man, a practitioner. His empiricism was based upon a kind of sensory atomism. He distinguished between primary characteristics of objects such as solidity, figure, extension, motion, rest and secondary characteristics due to the way we perceive them, such as colour, taste and smell. Berkeley, a bishop, disagreed with this separation of existence from perception his famous dictum was to be is to be perceived , Hume anticipated the modern conclusion of the logical positivists... 

For the first part of this century, there was a great division between wh might broadly be called the scientific and metaphysical schools of thought. T scientific school was exemplified by the objectivity of the logical positivists ai... 

These considerations illustrate how ideas in science converge to develop an increasingly sophisticated model of the nature of the sub-microscopic world. In the development of a scientific theory the principle of Occam s razor, with its emphasis on looking for the simplest option or explanation, can be useful. It can certainly be seen to apply to the model we have developed as the basis of reaction kinetics. However, we need to be careful in applying the razor as it cannot be the only consideration. Indeed the very basis of our ideas here, Dalton s atomic theory, was initially rejected by Ernst Mach and the logical positivists on the grounds that it was too complex. It took observations such Brownian motion and the explanations of this phenomenon put forward by Einstein to generate acceptance of the theory. 

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