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Comment by mhneu | Hacker News Reader

Eh.

The author claims that positivism has been debunked “by philosophers”. Certainly there are semantic arguments to be had if one wishes, but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

Also, the authors’ discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to be desired.

And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest role in impugning the idea of truth.

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Positivism was actually debunked by mathematics, not philosophy. In fact, this is why Platonism is accepted in mathematics and formalism scoffed at.

Take a look at Godel's incompleteness theorems - they hold that it's impossible to provide a proof for everything (formalization of "this statement is not provable", which is arguably both true and not true, results in a proof that the statement is true but not provably so).

A system containing first-order arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete because it cannot prove its own correctness itself, as it will result in the paradox mentioned above - it must resort to a higher-order system to do so (metamathematics). Thus, one can never have a firm axiomatic system from which to deduce all non-empirically-derivable aspects of reality, and as a result, logical positivism doesn't work.

I think philosophy proved this before mathematics. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, the same argument from over two thousand years ago.

But positivism claims knowledge comes only from a posterior knowledge not a priori. So it does not require completeness in any formal system, just consistency.

And even if a deductive system is inconsistent in an interesting way, observation (a posterior knowledge) will catch it and force us to devise another system.

You comment: "Eh. [...] the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers."

The article says just that:

> Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists.

You claim "the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated."

The article mentions Kuhn's and Bohr's anti-rationalism (which together with Feyerabend's anti-epistemology was surely influential for the postmodernism of Focault, Derrida, etc.), and traces it back to Kant.

> the anti-rationalism sprouting from Kuhn. For Kuhn’s legacy lives on, not in philosophy (where he is widely derided for his excesses) but in other parts of academia and in popular culture.

> As appropriated and mangled by Bohr and Kuhn, Kant—despite his own embrace of science and reason—becomes the agent of the anti-Enlightenment, the post-truth Age of Spin and Branding we live in.

The refutation is that the principle of verification upon which positivism rests is not empirical or tautological, which are requirements for meaningful statements. As such, the principle is neither verifiable nor meaningful.

My understanding is that the logical positivists were unable to satisfactorily answer this critique, and so it failed as a movement in philosophy.

Scientists aren't expected to be well versed in philosophy, so it's not a surprise if some or a lot of them naively hold on to philosophical views that have been heavily critiqued. Most of us probably hold such views, just like a lot of us have scientifically naive or invalid views.

Positivism was "defeated" by this paper:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism

However, most contemporary approaches to ontology are similar to positivism in application if not in presentation.

Many of the fruits of positivism are accepted by scientists and engineers, but I think Maudlin is correct in saying that the analytic school has (rightfully) shied away from the central positivist claim (i.e., that "any two observably equivalent theories are one and the same theory"/"a theory says no more than its observable consequences"). We've carried Popper and a few other positivists into the 21st century, but in a form that most would probably be unhappy with.

I agree about the wave/particle description, though. I've read Maudlin before in the context of the philosophy of time, and he is frequently critiqued in that domain for giving inadequate consideration to quantum-theoretic discoveries.

> We've carried Popper and a few other positivists

Popper was not a positivist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism:

However, the claim that Popper was a positivist is a common misunderstanding that Popper himself termed the "Popper legend."[57] In fact, he developed his beliefs in stark opposition to and as a criticism of positivism and held that scientific theories talk about how the world really is, not, as positivists claim, about phenomena or observations experienced by scientists.

Popper might not have considered himself a capital-P positivist for metaphysical reasons (and because of his skepticism towards logical positivism in particular), but his general approach to the philosophy of science is both compatible with and is taught as an example of the school.

There are all kinds of disagreements between Popper and the capital-P positivists (verification vs. falsification being the biggest one), but they don't preclude the inclusion of Popper in the broader positivist movement in the philosophy of science.

Popper was very concerned with explaining the actual underlying reality and what criteria contribute to better explanations - things like being more rigid. To me that seems quite against the main idea of _p_ositivism.

Popper even takes that stance that theory is prior to evidence - you start with the best explanation and even without new evidence or predictions, you move on to better explanations as they are discovered.

Since you are making this claim against his own words and without being backed up by respected sources, in what sense is he a _p_ositivist?

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them." Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations'

Layman's hopefully-dumb question here: if a theory has no observable consequences, then what is it even saying? (or doing, or etc)

If it isn't falsifiable, then it isn't scientific.

I'm cribbing that from reading the Wikipedia page on Logical Positivism, specifically the criticism of positivism by Popper.

>"And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest role in impugning the idea of truth."

I saw the is the other day, authored by democratic party advisers/pollsters:

>"Rather than having expert thinkers come up with the right solution to a problem, the process of trial and error creates multiple experiments that attempt to solve the problem and uses objective empirical results to determine the best solution. With this approach, more trials - and errors – produce better results.

[...]

This is the type of problem solving approach Millennials have used almost since birth. They use it every day on social networks to decide what movie to go to, at which restaurant to eat, and even for which candidates to vote. Rather than insisting on solving challenges using the inherited, but inevitably limited wisdom of experts, Millennials would prefer to share their ideas and let the group find the right answer through their combined experiences. Given how far astray critical thinking has often taken us, maybe it’s time to embrace the Millennial Generation’s approach and see if it leads to even better results than the preferred methods of older generations." http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/930173/12774430/130837...

So they recommend we should just do AB testing rather than use critical thinking to examine the consequences of our actions. This is the NHST mind virus that destroys everything it touches spreading beyond research.

The idea of trying multiple things and seeing what works is a good one, and doesn’t imply NHST logic.

Doesn’t sound like that’s what your quote is talking about though: they describe sharing ideas and “letting the group find the right answer.” Sounds like mob rule to me...

The quote does seem to explain why I now see many engineers turning first to blog posts rather than official documentation for projects, ignoring the experience of more senior team members, and diving into half-baked designs rather than thinking in advance about possible pitfalls.

So maybe overapplied Agile is also a generational phenomenon [or maybe there's just a meta-eternal-September when prior generations realize it's eternal Septembers all the way down and every generation makes the same mistakes]

As a Millenial, I'd really like to know who got paid actual money to write that stupid fucking article, so I can take their job and their funding and do something useful with it. Bloody hell!

> but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere? Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in other fields?

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere?

It should hold everywhere another framework has not proven to be more effective.

Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in other fields?

I don't think excessive positivism is a problem with politics today, do you?

You're mixing spheres here; social vs science.

As to why logical positivism is not successful in fields in science and engineering -- I would say that in general it is not possible to say that "any two observably equivalent theories are one and the same theory"

In particular, outside of science and engineering, it not possible to get a sufficient precision on what is "observably equivalent".

Actually, sufficient precision is usually not possible within science and engineering either.

Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics.

That is a narrative whose sole purpose is to disenfranchise and disempower the STEM community.

> Also, the authors’ discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to be desired.

Par for the course. A classical wave (think wet) is a large-scale pattern that emerges from the local interactions of many separate particles. A quantum ‘wave’ is some fundamental magical thing that just happens to look a lot like a large-scale pattern that emerges from the local interactions of many separate particles, but isn't (except in the Everett version).

> but isn't (except in the Everett version)

Not even in the Everett version. When we make a measurement to discover the large-scale patterns, we have to invoke the Born Rule and see just one outcome of the quantum wave. The other worlds of the Everett Interpretation are simply 'magical'.

No positivism philosophically isnt practiced by scientists as that would mean they didnt believe in falsification principle.

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