Stop pretending you’ve read Friedman.
Karl Popper is not a Logical Positivist. Verificationism is an integral part of Logical Positivism and Popper did not accept Verificationism. Therefore, Popper was not a Logical Positivist. Falsificationism is, at most, a close cousin to Logical Positivism and shared many of the same values. Also, Popper disagreed with the positivists over the use of induction in science, the importance of seperating meaningful from meaningless statements (he was more concerned with seperating scientific from nonscientific statements), and the status of metaphysical statements. For instance, he believed that seemingly metaphysical statements could become falsifiable due to advances in technology and theory, while the positivists though that metaphysical statements were meaningless and would remain so.
Does Hoppe actually claim that Popper is a logical positivist? You could get away with saying that Popper is an empericist in the broad sense, but he was in no way a logical positivist.
If you want to find a place to start in researching positivism, I would recommend reading Henri de Saint Simon.
Yes. About eight minutes in.
I can read wikipedia too. Listen to the Hoppe speech; he explains how someone can still be a positivist without being a verificationist.
Jesse, Verificationism is a central tenet of Logical Positivism. For AJ Ayer, Verification was THE central tenet of Logical Positivism. Otto Neurath called Popper “the official opposition”. How could Popper be the official opposition to a school of thought if he was a member of that school of thought?
Anti-metaphysics was the guiding value behind Logical Positivism. Karl Popper wasn’t against metaphysics. Therefore, Popper didn’t share the guiding value behind Logical Positivism.
Who do you think has a better grasp of Logical Positivism, AJ Ayer and Otto Neurath or Hans-Hermann Hoppe?
You should probably read through the thread I started a long time ago called What is wrong with Critical Rationalism?, where I lay out my case against Logical Positivism and Critical Rationalism (and explain some of the difference between the two).
Not a sound argument. The Monetarists are supposed to be “the official opposition” to the Keynesians, but their theories are rather similar.
How can one answer this question? We’d have to interview/test all of them, and listen to their arguments/rationale.
This is quite convincing, though.
Well, hold on. While Karl Popper didn’t condemn metaphysics like the other positivists did, he certainly didn’t endorse it to any degree either. He merely conceded that metaphysics wasn’t meaningless, but would still have to be unfalsified by empirical testing in order for it to be true. This is simply an implication of his methodology, which in my opinion, isn’t really a radical departure from the other positivists.
Regardless, I agree with you that Karl Popper does not fit the definition of a positivist very neatly. Whether we want to call him one or not is simply a matter of definitions.
Jesse,
Karl Popper was not a positivist; he was more Kantian than Humean. With due respect, Hoppe doesn’t know what he is talking about. Popper did not believe that knowledge could only be justified empirically. In fact, Popper rejected justified true belief as impossible and irrelevent. Popper wrote about science and the logical relation between observation reports and empirical theories, but he did not reject metaphysics. Many of his methodological arguments actually accord quite nicely with Austrianism (his “situational analysis” for social science is almost identical to praxeology).
Jesse,
Popper embraced metaphysics with his “metaphysical research programs.” For example, he wrote an entire book criticising determinism (see The Open Universe). To say that a theory is unfalsifiable is merely to say that it cannot be challenged by any possible empirical observation or experiment. An unfalsifiable theory cuts off one avenue of criticism, i.e. empirical testing, but that does not exhaust the tools of criticism at our disposal. Popper’s thoughts on metaphysics were deeper and more insightful than I expect Hoppe’s to ever be.
Quite a few people consider Popper not just an adherent but a major contributor to the positivist worldview. Heck, Habermas considered Popper a positivist - so it should be excusable for mere mortals to make the same conclusion. Hoppe, in contrast, is quite careful to locate Popper on a “fringe”.
Last I read Hoppe on this issue, he explodes certain Popper’s proposition logically - as inherently inconsistent. Whether he labels Popper or not I do not remember and it hardly matters for me - but for some people disagreable labeling is a good excuse not to consider the logic of an argument.
Karl Popper may not have been “against metaphysics” with regard to value - but I believe he was against it with regard to meaning and classifying as methaphysics and denying scientific validity to sciences that produce statements not falsifiable empirically.
Hoppe’s concern are not general philosophical issues but epistemological defence of Praxeology. He is challenging the aspects of Popper’s thought that bear on that issue.
Milton Friedman was a “free market economist” except when it came to the market in most important good - money supply.
No single communist can compare to Friedman in advancing socialism in US in the last century. Government intervention is much more concvincing when it is promoted by someone labeled (by court media) as the foremost free-markeer. Even Marxists prefer to quote Friedman on the central banking rather than the planks of the Communist Manifesto directly. And we would likely not have tax withholding today if soem communist rather than Milton Friedman had proposed it.
As a champion empiricist, Friedman did manage to oppose commodity money strictly on logical grounds while neglecting uniform empirical evidence of the failure of central banking.
But - what the heck, if the government can dictate anything, it can certainly dictate who is the guiding light of free market and libertarianism…
Jesse, where does Karl Popper say that metaphysics is meaningless? As far as I can tell he doesn’t claim such a thing, but instead claims that metaphysics simply isn’t science (but can still be valuable). The Logical Positivists thought of metaphysics not as just “not science”, but dangerous nonsense. For a long part of Popper’s career he considered Darwinian Evolution to be a metaphysical tradition that might one day become science (although he changed his mind later on). Even when he held this opinion, he didn’t condemn Darwinian Evolution as dangerous nonsense, but as a promising metaphysical theory that, hopefully, one day would become falsifiable and thus scientific.
As far as I can tell Hoppe uses the word “positivist” to mean what epistemologists call “empiricist”. In this case, he would probably call John Locke, Karl Popper, and Bas van Fraasen positivists (which to most would seem very strange). They are all empiricists yes, but none are positivists. This is the kind of mistake that calling Milton Friedman and Gary Becker Austrian Economists would be. Yes, they are both free market economists, but neither are specifically Austrian (in fact they are specifically of the Chicago School).
Solid_Choke,
Popper isn’t even an empiricist, at least not by the standards of conventional philosophy. Basically, Popper thought that all knowledge was both a priori and conjectural. In the critical rationalist framework, observation reports are theory-laden, i.e. interpretations, possibly false. For Popper, there is a continuum between the tacit knowledge selected through biological evolution and the abstract theories of science. In one sense, Popper viewed all science as a branch of metaphysics, though a very special and important branch. His criterion of falsification was nothing but a proposal for a convention or norm, with the goal being to avoid uninformative and empirically untestable theories; unfalsifiability is certainly a mark against a theory, but it since we are concerned with discovering truth, it cannot be decisive.
Lee Kelly, where does one get observation in order to falsify a theory? If from the sense experience, then yes, he is an empiricist. Simply because he thinks observations are theory-laden doesn’t make him not an empiricist. Bas van Frassen thinks observation is theory-laden, but he most definitely is an empiricist. I realize that traditionally rationalism is the antithesis of empiricism, in the case of Critical Rationalism, it is a degree of both.
Solid_Choke,
We don’t get observation reports from experience. An observation report is an interpretation of some experience. A falsification does not come from experience, though it may be motivated by an experience. A falsification is a decision to (tentatively) accept as true some observation report (and thus falsify any universal theory that contradicts the observation report). This decision is ordinarily motivated by some experience, but in principle it need not be. This is where the logic of falsificationism departs from the method. Methodologically, experience and inter-subjective testability are also necessary. A willingness to limit ad hoc dismissals, i.e. conventionalist stratagems, to protect a theory from falsification is also important. No experience forces us to accept any proposition as true or false; falsification is always a matter of free decision. Since it is always possible to reinterpret an experience (or falsify initial conditions) so that a theory is (logically) saved from falsification, logic alone cannot make these decisions for us. Extra-logical methodological rules are necessary for empirical science to function as a social enterprise, and for this purpose Popper made his proposals.
A.J. Ayer on Logical Positivism Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Quine’s Rejection of the Analytic Synthetic Distinction
Some more Quine Part 1,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Contra-Positivist views favorable to Austrian abstraction would be Aristotle, Wittgenstein (also Quinton on Wittgenstein), Kant, Frege and Husserl. For different reasons John Searle has interesting ideas, for example he rejects that there is a difference between myself thinking there is someone at the door, and my dog thinking there is someone at the door. Searle’s talk
Solid_Choke,
Popper was not an empiricist. The basic tenet of empiricism is that sense experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge (or at least the only legitimate source of synthetic knowledge), and Popper rejected this. Popper criticised empiricism for implying a “bucket theory of mind,” where the human mind is nothing but an empty space in which sense experience deposits knowledge. Popper rejected the idea that any source of knowledge was special or legitimate: all sources of knowledge were welcome. Popper held that no universal theory of science could be derived from observation reports, since he rejected induction altogether. Scientists may be inspired by observation reports to create a universal theory, but there need not be any special logic to this. In this sense, Popper viewed all the greatest achievements of science as being a priori (though not necessarily true), since they are intuitive creations of a human mind logically irreducible to sense experience (though perhaps causally related).
Hoppe doesn’t even begin to understand critical rationalist epistemology and methodology. I suspect it’s way over his head. Critical rationalist philosophy is radically different to traditional philosophy.
Lee Kelly, I agree that it is problematic to consider Popper to be an empiricist, but I am basically pushing back against the idea that Critical Rationalism is a kind of rationalism (as it is commonly understood). It seems to me that Critical Rationalism is as much an empiricist philosophy as it is a rationalist philosophy. Almost all of Popper’s examples of “good science” involve people falsifying theories using an “appeal to experience”. In this way, I consider him broadly an empiricist, but should have perhaps added qualifications.
Another problem with Positivism in relation to science is that science requires pre-suppositions(many of which are A priori ) such as reality exists, we can know at least something about reality,we can have certainty,human beings exist,causality exists and the universe has some sense of regularity.
Since positivism denies A priori knowledge and science does not attempt to prove the above pre-suppositions,Positivism ultimately destroys th possibility of a scientific science.It essentially negates all science.
It’s worth pointing out that Hoppe also labels Hayek a positivist.