Responding to the OP, are you saying that just because correlation is often confused with causation that any form of positivism (requiring proof of claim) is meaningless?
I believe he means to say that positivism is self contradictory. Requiring proof for everything means requiring proof of positivism, is there any?
Lol, you mean we need to prove that some things cause other things? Or I should say that some empirical phenomenon are linked to others? If there is no cause and effect, logic makes no sense. Logic depends on the ability of the logician to make chains of causes and effects right?
I think twistedbydsign99 is talking about this. That’s a link to a post that gives a good summary of the self-contradictory of positivism. That linked post was apart of a thread in which was a spin-off of this current thread here. Here’s a link to the beginning of that genus thread.
No, I am saying that if Logical Positivism is true than it is cognitively meaningless and that Critical Rationalists are against it because it does nothing to solve the problem of induction.
P = If Logical Positivism is true, then every cognitively meaningful statement is experimentally testable (in principle), or is an analytic truth.
P is not experimentally testable (in principle).
P is not an analytic truth.
Therefore, P is not a cognitively meaningful statement (assuming Logical Positivism is true).
If you accept that Logical Positivism is true, then you should conclude that it is cognitively meaningless. In other words, if you hold that Logical Positivism is true, you are engaging in metaphysics and not science. The whole point of being a Logical Positivist in the first place was to avoid doing metaphysics.
Logical Positivism isn’t self-contradictory (strictly speaking), but does undermine itself.
Logical Positivism does not have a monopoly on causation. Almost every epistemological theory accepts causation (although some do not in the way you are using it). Also, if causation is simply posited without being verifiable, then it is itself metaphysics (which is back to square one for Logical Positivism).
Just thought I would add; Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences by Murray N. Rothbard
Solid_Choke:
What do you think of A.J. Ayer? I think it is clear from his writings that he considered proof via empiricism to be qualitatively different from analytic proof. I think his notion of proof has more in common with Bayesian inference than logical necessity. Do you not find this a satisfactory explanation and justification for science?