The positivist dislikes the idea that there should be meaningful problems outside the field of ‘positive’ empirical science—problems to be dealt with by a genuine philosophical theory. He dislikes the idea that there should be a genuine theory of knowledge, an epistemology or a methodology. He wishes to see in the alleged philosophical problems mere ‘pseudo-problems’ or ‘puzzles’.
If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.
Teknik Yapısına Dair
Hubble Uzay Teleskobu, Dünya çevresindeki bir yörüngeye yerleştirilen ve morötesinden yakın kızılötesine
uzanan bir dalga boyu aralığındaki ışığı algılama yeteneğine sahip ilk gözlemevidir. 24 Nisan 1990’da Discovery uzay aracı ile yörüngeye yerleştirilen Hubble
şu anda yeryüzünden yaklaşık 550 kilometre yükseklikteki yörüngesinde saniyede
We may now return to a point made in the previous section: to my thesis that a subjective experience, or a feeling of conviction, can never justify a scientific statement, and that within science it can play no part except that of an object of an empirical (a psychological) inquiry. No matter how intense a feeling of conviction it may be, it can never justify a statement.
Thus Schlick says: ‘... a genuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification’ and Waismann says still more clearly: ‘If there is no possible way to determine whether a statement is true then that statement has no meaning whatsoever. For the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification.’ Now in my view there is no such thing as induction. Thus inference to theories, from singular statements which are ‘verified by experience’ (whatever that may mean), is logically inadmissible. Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable.
Shlick
"The problem of induction consists in asking for a logical justification of universal statements about reality... We recognize, with Hume, that there is no such logical justification: there can be none, simply because they are not genuine statements."
Modern positivists are apt to see more clearly that science is not a system of concepts but rather a system of statements.
If, following Kant, we call the problem of induction ‘Hume’s problem’, we might call the problem of demarcation ‘Kant’s problem’.
So long as theory withstands detailed and severe tests and is not superseded by another theory in the course of scientific progress, we may say that it has ‘proved its mettle’ or that it is ‘corroborated’ by past experience.
My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery contains ‘an irrational element’, or ‘a creative intuition’, in Bergson’s sense. In a similar way Einstein speaks of the ‘search for those highly universal laws... from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path’, he says, ‘leading to these... laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love (‘Einfühlung’) of the objects of experience.’