/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12515668
Lol dude that is just a stupid political attack on logical positivism. It's idiotic to think that positivism should be required to verify itself or whatever, positivism is simply how you know when you are asking a sensible question-- when you can discriminate between the answers through some sort of observation. If all the different possible answers lead to the same exact sense impressions, then there is no question. That's it.

It is logical positivism that allows you to understand that two coordinate systems for a physical problem are not different, they are really the same, when the predictions for all the sense-impressions predicted by the two systems are equivalent. So if someone insists that the world is really in polar coordinates (perhaps because rotations are important), and someone else insists that the world is really in rectangular coordinates (because translations are important), they are both being silly. Each coordinate system is as good as any other.

The positivism allowed 19th century physicists to convince themselves that fields are actual objects, as real as a chair, because there is a procedure to check if a field is present, just like there is a procedure to check if a chair is present. So it makes the abstract things concrete, whenver you can figure out a solid experimental test to see how the abstract thing is configured. But it also made other questions meaningless, like what is the true rest-frame of the ether? Or where is the electron exactly in the ground state of a Hydrogen atom?

The positivism is so essential for physics, that physicists automatically reduce the debates in other fields into the logically positivistically inequivalent positions, and tune out when the debate is meaningless. This is most debates, unfortunately, at least in the way that they are framed (usually there is a way to frame them so that the debates are meaningful too, it's just that if you aren't used to positivism, you don't tend to do that)

>>9700753
>I'm le language game man

>>9204114
Everything after the first two lines makes me want to kill.