When quantum arrived, the logical positivists strove valiantly to incorporate it into their new rationalism. They didn’t get far, and the attempt was overwhelmed as new blows to rationalism kept coming. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was the next most influential culturally.
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Logical positivism finally disintegrated altogether in the 1960s. It failed not for one reason, but for dozens, each individually fatal. I know of no discussion enumerating them all. _The Eggplant_ covers more of them than any source I’ve found.https://meaningness.com/eggplant
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Logical positivism was the last serious attempt to rescue rationalism. All subsequent rationalisms have been unserious, in the sense that they don’t even try to address the well-known problems that wrecked the logical positivist program.
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No coincidence the postmodern era began shortly after logical positivism collapsed. Rationalism was the foundational ideology of modernity. Without that, the essential chain of justification broke, and the ship of modernity was wrecked on the stormy seas of meaning.pic.twitter.com/F0m2yM2M9u
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Science still works, some of the time, of course. Rationality is still better than irrationality. Why? Stubborn clinging to the wreck of rationalism renders asking that question impossible—much less answering it.
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David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
We’re still floundering in the storm of postmodern irrationalism, announced by the NYT 100 years ago today. We can do better. We can rebuild the flotsam of a broken modernity into new, sea-worthy watercraft.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1193573460103946240 …
David Chapman added,
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Follow-up to this thread. Several replies objected that relativity couldn’t have been a shock, because science consists of replacing incomplete approximate theories with successively better ones. >
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This is not at all how science was understood in 1900. Science in those days found absolute, eternal, exact Truths. The “successively better theories” story, taught in high school now, was invented in the 20th century precisely to account for relativity and quantum.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Do you feel that the philosophy of science has done any work to reconcile the notion of "successively better theories" (truth) to our older conception of knowing Truth? Vervaeke talks about how insisting propositional truths are our only access to Truth severs our /
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Replying to @spearofsolomon @Meaningness
experiential connection to reality. It feels to me like proponents of the scientific worldview only want to dip into philosophy/metaphysics long enough to bury their heads in the sand with regard to this line of inquiry.
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That seems right to me!
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100 years ago today, the New York Times announced the death of rationalism.