[Europan Ocean (OP)]

I looked into logical positivism and scientism which is similar. The earlier philosophy was developed in Germany and other parts of Europe and had a following in England. This was a hundred tears ago. Holding that idea that everything had a rational explanation. In 1967 it was determined to be a faulty and so an obsolete philosophy. According to Wikipedia.

Derek Prince was a professor of logic at Cambridge, he became more like a mystic after an encounter with God.

What replaces it for Naked Scientist forum members? I have heard some of Biola University's Professor Habermas. And thinking in the here and now with Eckhart Tolle.

I think there is value in sharing the subjective as well as the objective reality.

[alancalverd]

If it's not rational, it's not an explanation, nor does it have any predictive value. So why bother with it?

[alancalverd]

it was determined to be a faulty and so an obsolete philosophy.

All philosophy is rendered obsolete by experiment. Discuss (10 marks).

[Kryptid]

Holding that idea that everything had a rational explanation.

This is something that has bothered me for a while. When people say there's a rational explanation for some given phenomenon, isn't that sort of a tautology? I mean, can something be true that isn't rational? I figured we based rationality itself on things that are known or discovered to be true. Even if a discovery seems absurd at first (quantum mechanics and relativity, for example), surely we would in retrospect call it rational after it is better understood?

[alancalverd]

There is an infinity of irrational explanations for any phenomenon, and frequently more than one that stands up to an initial experiment. There is nothing rational about quantum mechanics, or indeed existence - it just is.

[Europan Ocean (OP)]

Logical Positivism is no longer taught at universities, but has been a past strong influence on most people. It's aim was to clarify questions and answers, but Wikipedia says it was found not to work, but doesn't explain exactly why so.

From Chat GPT:

It is difficult to say who the most prominent post-neopositivist philosopher is, as the field is broad and diverse. However, some notable figures in the field include Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas. They have made significant contributions to the development of post-neopositivist philosophy and continue to be widely read and discussed in academic circles.

Also:

Logical Positivism, also known as Logical Empiricism, was discontinued for several reasons. One of the main reasons was the discovery of inherent flaws in its central tenets, such as the verification principle, which stated that the meaning of a proposition was equivalent to the method of its verification. This principle was challenged by philosophers who pointed out that it was not possible to verify all meaningful statements, such as those in the fields of ethics and aesthetics.

Additionally, the logical positivists failed to account for the role of metaphysics, which they had deemed as meaningless, in shaping our understanding of the world. Moreover, they did not provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of induction, which is the problem of how we can make generalizations from limited observations.

Finally, the rise of various forms of postmodernism and continental philosophy, which challenged the positivist notion of objectivity and universal truth, also contributed to the decline of logical positivism.

Overall, the discontinuation of logical positivism was a result of both internal criticisms and external challenges to its fundamental assumptions and methods.

I think the subjective is part of the mind and any objective truth becomes subjective, once you understand it.

Psychology is not empirical science yet is very important, there is the empirical Periodic Table and there is DNA. There is IQ, EQ, the empathy test, and yes logic, but also memory, aesthetics, creativity, lateral thought, positive thought, love, awe, visual art and pattern finding, creativity in words, with understanding and meaning, like Tolkien or CS Lewis or JK Rowling's works.

There is more to the brain than logic.

[alancalverd]

Calverd's Rough Guide to Common Sense:

All isms are faulty: they are either too flexible to be meaningful, too rigid to allow development and refinement, prone to corruption, or fundamentally evil.

If your hypothesis stands up to trial, use it. If not, abandon or modify it.