I fail to
see how anything I wrote could be construed as logical
positivism. For a start, I am more influenced by the later
Wittgestein, himself an opponent of the Vienna Circle, and
by Thomas Kuhn, who is anything but a positivist, logical
or otherwise. Moreover, most often when people are accused
of being logical positivists, it is because the term has
become a byword for bad philosophy (David Hull calls them
"The all-purpose evil demons of modern philosophy"), when
in fact they were very good philosophers and their
arguments took considerable hard work to dismantle. If the
reader has specific criticisms of them or me, it would pay
to hear them in detail on the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins.
The term I use is "metaphysical naturalism" -
"philosophical" is Johnson's term, and it is ambiguous. You
trade on that ambiguity here. I do not assert that
metaphysical naturalism is known to be true. That is not
disbelief; it is reserving judgement on a matter than is
not (as yet, if ever) decideable. And I do not then "turn
around on the assumption it must be true". The reader has
failed to appreciate that method and metaphysics are
distinct. One can, in fact I think has no alternative, use
methodological naturalism to learn about the world. But
this is not to proceed on the grounds of
metaphysical naturalism of any kind. Indeed, if one
is a thoroughgoing theist, as a scientist one still has to
proceed using method that is naturalistic in science (and
in a great deal of ordinary life as well).
You say the issue is twofold: what is real and true? and
How do we know? I agree. Reality and truth are ontological
and metaphysical questions. Knowledge is an epistemological
question. One knows what one knows through the exercise of
reason and evidence, and nothing else in science.
Intuitions, internal revelations, and mystical experiences
won't cut it in science, no matter how some might wish that
is did. But for all science knows, they may still be real.
I fail to see why this is a contradiction, or that hard to
understand.
How do I know (I presume non-circularly) that science is
the most successful way of learning about the world? Simply
put - because we can do a lot more and more reliably
through science with the world than we ever could with
anything else. And I would claim that the criteria for
success in this regard are not dependent on science itself.
More people live through disease, we treavel farther and
faster, we can communicate better, we can live longer, we
can build bigger and better (sometimes) and we can explain
more, through science than through astrology, alchemy,
divination, or ritual. Deny it if you please, you won't
convince many.
The rhetorical questions are unanswerable, mainly
because they appear to mean nothing. Is truth to be taken
as correspondence to the physical world of a statement?
Then I answer, yes, you can test the truth of statements.
is it coherence to the larger body of knowledge we have
about the world? Then yes, I can test the truth of a
statement. But to assume that sense perception is in need
of justification, or induction for that matter, before we
can say we know anything leads us to what Hume called
"Pyrrhic Skepticism" - a denial that there even is
knowledge. At that point, I have to say, your use of the
word "knowledge" is faulty. You must be talking about
something else - perhaps mathematical certainty, I don't
know.
The reduction of science to regularities is itself a
standard doctrine of positivism. Do you really want to
adopt that view here?
