Neopositivism

• Neopositivism was a philosophical current opposed to the metaphysical and theologizing thought, a "mode of thought grounded in experience and adverse to speculation".
• Metaphysics is an enquiry that raises questions about reality that lie beyond or behind those capable of being tackled by the methods of science.
• Neopositivists endorsed a view of science as a building of statements which could reduce of statements about empirically given.
• Other statements were simply rejected.
• Neopositivists tried to translated a very generally statement to what can be empirically experienced.
• Relevant precursor scholars include Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Moritz Schlick.
• Theoretical constructs lack immediate experiential significance and an interpretation for the resulting theoretical network.
• Theoretical apparatus provides predictive and postdictive bridges from observational data to potential observational findings.
• Theoretical network establishes explanatory and predictive connections between the data of direct observation.
• Rudolf Carnap introduced the quantitive concept of degree of confirmation: degree of probability of hypothesis h on the basis of empirical evidence e.
• The inductive inference is the instrument of predictive knowledge.
• The tool for justification in science is deductive inferences.
• Deductive inference is top down, from general principles to facts.
• Induction is the instrument of a scientific method that is intended to discover something new, something going beyond previous observation.
• Empiricism rejected the inductive reasoning because it is not connected to the experience.
• The meaning of a statement is its method of verification.
• A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proven true or false.
• Inductive inferences are bottom up, from the data that will justify the truthfulness of the theory.
• Inductive reasoning is the core of science because it adds something.
• Inductive inferences provide justification (validation) for the theory at stake.
• The laws of nature are hypothetical in character.
• Inductive inferences are the core of science because they add something.
• Rudolf Carnap proposed to abandon the concept of verification and instead say that the hypothesis is more or less confirmed or disconfirmed by the evidence.
• Statements that don’t meet these conditions are meaningless and must be excluded from the scientific domain.
• The method of verifiability was too strict, it is not possible to obtain a definitive verification/confutation of every meaningful statement.
• In confirmability, data can either increase the probability of the statement or decrease it.
• The number of available experiments is finite, thus the laws of nature cannot be definitely controlled.
• Concept logical analysis reduces all knowledge to the empirically given, meaning there is no place for theoretical terms because they go beyond the empirically given.
• Neopositivism recognizes that not every statement can be reduced to statements about the empirically given, stating that there is a distinction between observational and theoretical lexicon.
• Empiricists and positivists rely on empirical evidence and positive data, stating that there is only knowledge from experience.
• Scientific statements in neopositivism are divided into true or false.
• Metaphysics is connected in our ordinary way of speaking, leading to linguistic misleadings.
• The method of control in neopositivism is verifiability, stating that every statement can be defined as either true or false, with no probability.
• Deductive inferences are criticized for the belief that logic can be gained by using a deductive logic.
• In the second phase of neopositivism, there is a distinction between observational and theoretical lexicon, stating that not every meaningful statement can be reduce to the empirically given.
• If the premises are true, the truthfulness of the premise entails the conclusion, meaning there is nothing new in the conclusion that is contained in the premises.
• The goal of unified science and the adoption of the method of logical analysis are tightly connected.
• In the first phase of neopositivism, there is no distinction between observational and theoretical lexicon, stating that science only deals with the former because the latter is completely reduce to the empirically given.
• Through logical analysis, concepts are ordered in a reductive system, with the lowest layer containing concepts of the experience and qualities of the individual psyche.
• Intersubjectivity is the possibility to reach an agreement about a subject.