Objection · Case 07 · Philosophy
Logical positivism failed for technical reasons about how to formulate verifiability, not because someone pointed out it was self-refuting. Philosophers moved on to falsificationism and other views that don’t have the same problem.
One objection from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Response
The technical failures were real and were the main reason positivism collapsed. The self-refutation objection was one of the criticisms, raised early within Wittgenstein’s circle and pressed later by Putnam and others, not the only one. On Popper: falsificationism is a criterion for distinguishing science from non-science, not for what may rationally be believed, and Popper himself explicitly denied that metaphysical claims were meaningless. So the successors to positivism do not rescue strong scientism; they abandon it.
About this exhibit
This objection is to The Vienna Circle and the verification principle.
In the 1920s and 1930s a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle tried to make this exact idea rigorous. Their verification principle said, roughly, that a statement is meaningful only if…
Under Claim 01: The rule “only what science or logic can prove is worth believing” cannot pass its own test.