Truth, Falsehood and Fiction

8/4/2019 Truth, Falsehood and Fiction

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Truth, Falsehood and Fiction

Manuel Alejandro Rodrguez Pardo


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Proem:

I have re-written this essay as an English language writing sample, to show you that

beyond the inherent easiness of my statement of purpose, I have sufficient command

of this language to deal with much more intricate topics in support of the wide range

of my future class contributions.

The present essay aims to show the failure of the inductive method to guarantee

objectivity and certainty, through critical analysis of Ayers verificacionsm and Poppers

falsifiability. We will attempt a solution which encompasses the relevant problems that

are the realism vs antirealism debate as well as its various dimensions. I feel obliged to

point that you are dealing with a philosophical creative work. It will include some

boldness, for which I apologize.


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The problem of induction

Human knowledge is supposed to be covered by scientific objectivity since Galileo and

Newtons works were popularized in the XVII century. Francis Bacon developed the

inductive method largely due to the influence of those works. A method that Augusto

Comte would be so prone to implement into his system, to progressively comprehend

the world regardless of any first or final causes. Metaphysics could distort the purity of

scientific observation which produces the laws of nature in the ultimate positive stage

of humanity in the XIX century. Soon acid critics to the inductions inconsistency arose,

even obviating the antagonism between positivism and the German hermeneutical

philosophy of Wilhem Dilthey or the romantic philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

David Hume, in mid XVIII century, reported the circularity of a method that requires of

itself in order to be justified. The use of induction to justify induction does not look like

an acceptable method; nonetheless Hume did not want to destroy Comtean positivism

especially its consequences aimed at saving us from metaphysics and allowing us to

advance. Hence he strives to save probability from the sinking induction.1

He lowers

the scientific certainty to probability but leaving everything else as it was before. The

hypostatic experience is allowed to generate theories which his mitigated skepticism

holds under close scrutiny. There are no absolute certainties, but metaphysics must

burn whilst the probabilities that science requires relies on the custom. That is Humes

line of thought. The neopositivism will then have to face the newer criticism against

probabilistic criteria. That criticism conveys that although the probability of a theory

1David Hume, Investigacin sobre el conocimiento humano, Alianza Editorial 1999, Seccin 6, pag 90.


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increases to the degree to which confirming events take place, one refuting event is

enough to nullify that previous probability. And hence it becomes evident that all

decisions taken under the guidance of that criterion were mistakes induced by a

contingent probability. That is why it is necessary to find new grounds to hold the

grand structure of science.


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Commit it then to the flames:

for it can contain nothing

but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume

Alfred Jules Ayer:

The British philosopher can be considered a high representative of the logical

neopositivism, especially in his main work Language, Truth and Logic where he

develops the milestone of his philosophy which is the verification principle. Ayer is

ready to give conclusive reasons to eradicate metaphysics, as were his predecessors in

the Vienna Circle. He claims that he could establish a sentence validity attending to the

criterion of significance, which consists on whether a sentence has content or it is

empty and has to be dismissed as nonsense.

Its convenient to point out here, that despite the fact that we are talking about the

verification principle, Ayers attention is now focused on significance rather than

the propositions truth or falseness. Notice the meaning reduction he performs: The

words and are just affirmative or negative signs on the

sentence.2

He develops this purification labor in the same line as Rudolf Carnap did some years

before in his article from 1932 The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical

2Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, CapV, pag 103.


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Analysis of Language.3 They configure a brief array of rules that any proposition must

fulfill in order to be meaningful. These rules are, of course, beyond metaphysics. And

the array is preceded by the old empirical principle which states that there is no

meaningful utterance unless it describes what could be experienced. According to this,

Bertrand Russell conveyed in 1912: Every proposition we can understand must be

entirely formed by constituents that we are already familiar with.4 Ayer shared some

ideas with the former philosophers, but he did not go into depth on his predecessors

ideas. He did, however, formulate a much more liberal criterion, with which to define

the limits of thought.

Before any definitive formulation, he argues from, not so normative postulates, and

under the same aim that: From empirical premises no over-empirical consequences

can be inferred.5 He considers it evident and immediately tries to guess the

metaphysical objection, the so called intellectual intuition.

But is it really self evident? He seems to forget the origin of some disciplines such as

Logic or Mathematics (the consensual formal sciences). They came from the operative

intelligence, from the empiricism, but they do not belong to it. They are in a particular

over-empirical place, which certainly does not mean their transcendence.

He keeps this question unstated until the fourth chapter.6

His solution is a statement

against Kant, he considers them analytical and tautological disciplines. Therefore, they

dont need to refer to any real phenomenon, but would reveal the relations within the

3Rudolf Carnap, berwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse derSprache in Erkenntnis,

vol. 2, 1932.4

Bertrand Russell, The problems of Philosophy 1912, pag 91. 5Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. I, pag. 38.

6Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap IV, pag 82.


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rules with which we manage our symbols. Formal sciences are hence necessarily true

just because they cannot be the other way around. They are tautologies whose

predicate is included in the notion of the subject. The author of Language truth and

Logic may have considered that we are not facing an over-empirical subject, but an

under-empirical one attending to the evident distinction between these two planes.

Anyway, it is convenient to ask ourselves a question at this point. Are the analytical

structures (self referential ensembles of rules and its vocabulary) independent from

the synthetic structures that make the alleged reality of the experience? Or were these

analytical structures born steady and self-sufficient in an under-empirical, and scarce

in significance, world?

Other considerations may help us with these questions. Ayer is committed to the

phenomenal theory that understands the things like beams of accidents, in the way of

Berkeley or Scout in the XX century. The theory substitutes the theist reference to an

absolute which experiences the accidents, for the ensembles of properties formulated

by the Gestalt school of psychology: we can accept as an empirical fact that authentic

or organic ensembles (of properties) exist.7 Due to the Logic is merely tautological,8

Ayer is free to elude some relevant questions. Accidents for what? Properties of what?

These questions would require an analysis, respectful of the definitions of those terms.

Instead of asking those questions, he briefly refers to the Gestalt school, which brings

to mind the Latin proverb: Excusation non petita, accusation manifiesta (He who

excuses himself, accuses himself) due to the speculative origins of the school. Max

7

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. II, pag. 65.8Vase, que sobre los conjuntos de percepciones de la Gestalt, llega a decir que s algn mtodo

analtico la negara, esto mostrara que el mtodo es errneo.


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Wertheimer, Wolfgang Khler and Kurt Koffka founded the school upon the studies of the

apparent movement of the so called Phi phenomenon. They developed the laws with

which the perceptive experience tends to perceive forms. As we can see in its fundamental

principle the Prgnanz law (pregnancy) that establishes the perceptive experience

tendency to adopt the simplest form possible.9

Needless to say that these laws cannot be

the ground for a rigid objectualism, without the subject that the properties require, and

therefore without any metaphysical reference. They are not rigid laws or deterministic

laws but they still attempt a response to the question; properties of what?

Ayer allows himself to stand that, as we said, because he identifies philosophy with a

linguistic analysis, and the former is understood as an epiphenomenon of Logic. Which

just, to quote Ayer, can be useful to increase our knowledge about the sentences where

we refer to the material things, so we can translate sentences of a certain kind (factual

content sentences), although there is already a sense in which we understand such

sentences. 10 These considerations push us back to the analytical propositions we saw

before. Are they invariable per se? And, are they independent from the synthetic

structures?

Verification Principle

The rule with which Ayer determines the language significance is no other than the

verification principle. He proceeds as follows. Firstly, he notes that in his view, every

indicative sentence will be declarative in its linguistic use, and its sense will have to be

9

J. F. Brown, Sistemas de psicologa: fenomenologa, psicologa de la Gestalt, psicologa delindividuo, Paids, 1966.10

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdady lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. III, pag. 78.


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literal if the proposition that it conveys to is an analytical proposition, in the sense we

saw before, or empirically verifiable. Secondly he presents a new criterion of

significance in the first chapter of the book, but he will correct it in the introduction,

added fourteen years later. That circumstance makes the criteria notably difficult to

interpret, however it is still quite helpful.

In his first approach to the verification principle, the author distinguished between a

strong meaning, linked to the tradition, and a weaker version: A proposition can be

verified in the strong sense, when its truth can definitely be established through

experience, and verified in the weaker sense, when it is possible for the experience to

make it probable.11

As seen in its most general formulation from the introduction, the verification principle

stands that a phrase would be significant if it could be known by what observations the

phrase came (under certain conditions), to be taken as true or false. In a new twist to

encircle and thus fortify verifiability, Ayer added the use of "certain premises" to the

process. Now, a proposition would be verifiable (a genuine factual proposition), if we

can deduct from it one or more experiential propositions (real or potential

observations) along with other premises. Other premises cannot be deducted from

such a proposition exclusively. His eagerness to get as close as possible to a valid

principle for the actual use of scientific theories, this last definition, gives meaning to

any inductive proposition, which did not please him when he wrote the earlier

formulation in 1946. He introduces a restriction saying that premises have to be

verifiable or analytic. This would again avoid the danger of metaphysics, but making his

11Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. I, pag. 41.


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significance lean towards the delimitation of analytics. We discussed the topic in

previous lines and we will find in the following lines new and interesting unresolved

issues which we will undertake to explain. The delimitations were not likely to satisfy

the author, because that correction to which we refer introduces a new reflection on

the analytics; more specifically, on the principle of verifiability in analytics:"While the

statements containing those terms do not seem to describe anything that anyone has

ever observed, a can be done, which would be able to transform them

into verifiable statements, and the statements that constitute the dictionary can be

considered as analytical.

So after all, the analytics can be verifiable because it is in a dictionary, which makes it

analytical. The arguments circularity and hence its invalidity is unavoidable. He

allocates every unsatisfactory statement under the analytical label and closes the file.

Are not we clear about the presence, in a dictionary, of terms such as: God ((From

lat. Dues) A Supreme Being who is considered by monotheistic religions, the world

maker) or Entelechy (Real thing which carries in itself the original cause of its action

and tends by itself to its own purpose)? Ayer insists and adds: I consider that the

characteristic feature of metaphysics, in the pejorative term of my understanding, is

not only that his statements do not describe anything that is susceptible, even in

principle to be observed, but also that there is no dictionary where such statements

could be changed into verifiable, directly or indirectly. 12 That is to say; the verifiability

of the analytic lies in its ability to be circumscribed by the dictionary, and that is

precisely what makes analytic the analytics, and also what makes metaphysics

12Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Introduccin 1946,

pag. 21


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unverifiable. If clarity is the philosophers politeness and the aim was not a display of

rhetoric. Would it not be better for Ayer to say: The dictionary shows analytic

declarations, which are never metaphysical and always verifiable, to conclude: my

arguments are, as I showed, none! Even though, I do not t think we should be too

worried about the lack of distinction between science and metaphysics that the

authors misdirection would imply, since he says in another chapter: A conclusion that

does not follow from its premises, is not sufficient to prove that it is false". However it

is enough to say that the conclusion has not been proven. We should not be worried

overall because he did not offer also a single argument, to link his lack of ability to

reject metaphysics from the plane of meaningful propositions, to his lack of distinction

between metaphysics and science.

With regard to the circularity of the revision from 1946 I will ignore it for what is to

come with the intention of stressing the most relevant flaw of his theory. Namely, all

reasoning, that leads the author to discard metaphysics, assume an excessively limited

consideration about analytical propositions. A range we will reconsider before dealing

with the verification principle.


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The illusion of the worlds illusory

could always accompany us

within the most real world of them all,

but the belief in the reality of the world

can accompany us

in the most illusory of all worlds.

Antonio Machado

Karl R. Popper:

Popper also does not agree with the induction to distinguish what is science from what

is not, since the inductive verification is limited to observations, it is unable to make

universalizations from the regularities detected. Science and metaphysics, under this

point of view have not been distinguished: "The reason is that the positivist concept

of" meaning "or "Sense" (or verifiability or inductive confirmability, etc.), is inadequate

to allow this demarcation, simply because it is not necessary that metaphysics would

be meaningless so it cannot be science."13

His arguments against inductivism do not

end there: "the principle of induction has to be a universal statement. So, if we try to

say that we know from experience that it is true, the same problems that led us to its

introduction just reappear. In order to justify induction we have to assume an

inductive principle of higher order, and so on. Therefore the attempt to ground the

inductive principle on the experience, inevitably leads to an infinite regress ()Kant

tried to escape from this difficulty admitting that inductive principle (which he called

13Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994, pag. 309.


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"principle of universal causation") was " a priorivalid, but in my opinion, failed in his

ingenious attempt to give a priorijustification of synthetic statements ".14

The verification principle does not work because it is too intertwined with the

inductive method, so one has to find another demarcation criterion (to differentiate

between science and metaphysics). It is widely known that this criterion in Poppers

thought is falsifiability, although he calls it refutability in some texts: A system

should be considered scientific, only if it makes claims that may conflict with the

observations. And the way to test a system is, in fact, trying to create such conflicts,

namely, trying to refute it. Thus, testability is the same as rebuttal and can be taken as

well, therefore, as a criterion of demarcation.15

Falsifiability

This new criterion of demarcation allows him to delimitate scientific propositions from

pseudo-scientific propositions. Theorists must therefore pursue the falsity, to discover

the errors of the theory, and so create a flood of new information which again creates

new problems. As indeed what follows is also a problem: The theoretician who is

interested in the truth, must also be interested in falsehood. The discovery of a false

statement is equivalent to discovering that its negation is true. The presence here of

an analytic truth allegedly allows him to recognize the progress of scientific knowledge

through falsification.

14Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, 1982, pag. 29.

15Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994, pag. 312.


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Each successful falsification contributes to the construction of new theories capable of

repelling successive attempts of falsification. With this method, one should distinguish

between the convenience of coexisting and competing theories, and choose those that

show greater resistance to falsification. Another difficulty implied by falsifying a theory

is about the time when a theory becomes obsolete. Popper regards a theory as

falsified from the moment it is refuted, while for Kuhn a theory will only be discarded

when it coexists with another, citing Bacon, Truth will sooner come out from error

than from confusion.16 To be fair we should point out that Popper concluded through

dialogue with the American philosopher, thatthe theory (that replaces the coexisting

immediately falsified one), should succeed both in the area where the former was

successful, as in the area of the field where it was falsified. Despite having found a

truth in the logical sense within the falsifiabilistic structure, Popper agrees: "This

disposal system can give a true theory.But although it was true, this method cannot

establish its truth in any way, as the possible number of true theories remains infinite

at any time after any number of crucial tests." This statement diverts from the

inductive aspirations, which anticipated the result of natural phenomena from the

former ones. It also diverts from the risk of considering that former and present

conditions were completely evaluated, and they will intervene again as they did

before.

What we may ask next is how is it possible that without hope of getting any truth, yet

they speak of logical truths, objectivity and scientific progress? Where would it be

addressed? These questions force us to introduce his theory of the three worlds. "The

world is composed of at least three sub-antagonistic worlds: the first is the physical

16Francis Bacon, El avance del conocimiento, 1605.


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world or the physical states,the second is the mental world or the states of mind,the

third is the intelligible world or the ideas in the objective sense,the world of possible

objects of thought: the world of theories in themselves and their logical relationships,

arguments, issues and situations taken by themselves ".17

Thanks to his theory, the

objective world is not directly associated with the scientific world, which in turn is a

part of the subjective world (second world), but is the product of man but, not just

coming from his whims, it is an autonomous world. Although Popper, finally accepts

that the three worlds interact between them, the third being modifiable by culture,

not by men. Let me tentatively stress that the distinction made here between the

second and the third world, is comparable with the delimitation of analytic

propositions in Ayers main work.

But, if what has been said up to now is correct then we have to face the relevant issue

of, in what sense is the term truth as used by Popper throughout his work. He

applies the theoretical formulation of the term developed by Tarski: Arrive at a

definition of truth and falsehood simply by saying that a sentence is true if it is satisfied

by all objects, and false if otherwise (...) the semantic conception of truth does not give

us, so to speak, any choice among various non-equivalent definitions of this

concept.18Popper notes that this conception of truth is incorrect notwithstanding that

there may be others. He simply uses it knowing it is necessary to keep working on it,in

its complexity and diversity,but also enjoying the benefit of returning to the intuitive

notion of truth as adequacy to the facts, to the things. It is an objective and absolute

truth, which he overtly operates, while adopting the Kantian notion of the man

17

Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, Tecnos, 1982, pag. 148. 18Alfred Tarski, La concepcin semntica de la verdad y los fundamentos de la semntica, Nueva

Visin, 1972., pp. 33-35.


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imposing laws on nature and not the other way round: "Our intellect does not get its

laws from nature () but it imposes them on nature a claim that needs to be

compatible with the assertion that calls for theories to speak of empirical reality to the

extent they impose limits.

I believe I have shown the enormous difficulties Popper faces to hold some reality

without truth, so then, with the intent to circumvent them, he coined his credibility

as an approach to the concept of truth. A notion that represents some measurement

of the approach of one theory against another, towards the truth.The inconsistencies

of this resource are recognized even by its author, unable to deny the possibility that

corroborated hypotheses are increasingly becoming less credible.There seems no way,

even in colossal Popperian construction for a realism founded in extrinsic truths.

The awareness of the unsolvable difficulties showed by the logical neopositivism (for

whose analysis we looked at Ayer as its exponent), does not make the Austrian-British

philosopher give up in his mission to preserve science and metaphysics distinction. His

criticism is destructive and contains no apparent constructive criticism. Although

building is more difficult than destroying, which is in fact the support (once

discovered), to his philosophy; the repeated attempt to destroy theories that grounds

likelihood. Likelihood (inconsistent if it has no direct relationship with the truth that

Popper denies),that emanates from the third world,from the analytical world (where

we detect a glimmer of hope placed by the author), in which lies the objectivity that

grounds the falsification that distinguishes science, from the mental speculative and

illusory phenomena.


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The Karl Popper's ontological realism is extremely paradoxical, since it claims that

reality exists and is unable to provide some objective truth, just a structure that we

generously call arguable. Where there is no more solidity to delimitate the thought,

thanthe scope of the analytics, or third world. Is this something new?


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To live is essentially,

and before anything else, a structure:

a dreadful structure

is better than none.

Jos de Ortega Y Gasset

Conclusion:

The strenuous efforts to overcome the failure of induction, preserving the traditional

role of science, have led us through different argumentative structures, which made

the theories an aggregate of the empirical experience, through the filter of analytics.

This tradition manifests itself as an implicit prejudice where the theories have a

secondary and derivative character (probably psychologically motivated by their

continuous variations). It is however a wrong bias that shifts the direction of our

discussion to barren regions.

The empirical experience, as it is well known, is to observe passively or actively

(intervening), the phenomena of the externality. This tradition, has invested the

observation (originally just watching) with a high status, as a pristine objectivity

reminiscent of the "blank slate". We found the opposition to the bias in 1958 in the

book "Patterns of discovery" where J. Hanson studying visual observation reveals that

the theory is always present and even prior to the stimulation. Hanson claims that

"scientists do not see the same thing," referring to Kepler and Galileo (notice that this

example encompasses much more than an allusion to the visual cortex), and studies

perceptual variations between subjects with different pre-theorizations of the


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phenomena, using series of figures characteristic of the psychological theory of

Gestalt. His thesis could be succinctly formulated in these words: "The vision is an

action that carries a theoretical load. The observation of X is shaped by prior

knowledge of X, " or in these other words: Knowledge is in the vision and it is not

something attached to it. "

Following Hansons examples, like the one of Kepler and Galieo, and the fact that the

laws of the composition of the Gestalt are not limited to the sense of sight, it does not

seem too risky to make a broad interpretation of Hanson's thesis, which encompasses

both the perceptions derived from the senses we might call direct (although they are

basically mediations) and the indirect from the use of technical instruments such as

telescopes or positron emission tomographies. In this sense the extended argument

would be: "We perceive the external firstly as mediated by theories." We hear the

words we expect to hear, select within the multiplicity of what we see through a

microscope based on what we know about its structure, and we move slowly and

creatively to a new speculation.

What (how could it be otherwise), brings us new challenges. When we track back the

chain of perceptions and theories then perceptions and so on, to reach the first

insights and guesses; in the early moments we have to guess the existence of some

proto-conjectures of the ancestral use. Conjectures that can be detected and traced, in

the well documented genetic intuitions or the prenatal patterns of recognition.

Once overcoming this bias, I would like to turn to other flaws in these theories that I

call traditional. They often intend to take account of the truth (of the reality of the

whole world), which incurs a difficult self-referentiality. Here we come finally to the


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referred question of the analytics and its treatment and delimitation. We can not

justify that a system that defines the Truth would be true. We can not violate the

second incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gdel which states: "No consistent system

can be used to prove itself".19

Although he is not the only one who recognizes this

need.Alfred Tarski in his theory of the mandatory separation between object language

and meta-language says: "No philosophical language used could have a self-reflexive

meaning," or Wittgenstein himself (the second) in his theory of the anti-theoretical

language game:"The language games are only understandable in certain contexts and

having a background of a certain lifestyle. Therefore there are no meanings

(propositions) related to all language games, since there is only a family resemblance

between them".This steady approach can be even found in the logical framework of

the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" of the early Wittgenstein, when it refers, in that

permanently cryptic and terse tone (sensu lato), to thearbitrariness of its notations.20

Therefore, we have the inability to close the analytic field, as it has been claimed,

because it requires the establishment of begging questions by way of lists of axioms.

Perhaps a prime example is the logical studies of Gotthard Gnther, which calls for a

three-valued logic, which was "strong and ductile enough to start to embrace the

complexity"and where the principle of the "tertium datur" by which a proposition may

be true or false, or something else that participates in both, would be accepted

(contrary to classical logic and its axioms). This new system of axioms was proposed

after trying to overcome the paradoxes of Church and Gdel's theorems, which in turn

Bertrand Russell considered. But this of course, is not the only possible example of

19

Kurt Gdel, 1931 Sobre proposiciones formalmente indecidibles de los Principia mathematica ysistemas afines, Teorema, 1980 y 2. edicin: 1981. 20

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus 3.342.


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different logics with question-begging flaws. In fact, other logics have been found in

different cultures as Jujjien Franois has shown for China, and as does the

"Tetragrammaton" the logic of Buddhism in India. Consequently, the eradication of

creative imagination or philosophical speculation, including the scope of analytical

propositions is a chimera. With no induction, verification, or falsification as a criterion

to explain reality, it seems we are obliged to give our consent to a dynamic view of the

world. Not a view in the way ofthe lie that Nietzsche defends:"only as an aesthetic

phenomenon is the existence of the world justified",21

but in the way of reasoned

fiction. Not as an interventive realism of entities such as Hackings,22 but an

interventive antirealism of theories as "the art of simulation," aesthetic and creative,

as an unrestrained sense of touch.

How can we distinguish under this assumption between observable and unobservable

entities?With regard, for example, to the widely argued electron phenomena, Ernst

Mach responded (when somebody came to ask him about the atoms),"Have you ever

seen any?" Despite the many differences between his neo-positivistic proposal and

ours, he also argued that atoms like everything else whether observable or

unobservable, are mental constructs of perceptions which are consistent in space and

time. He adds in another passage: "science can only reproduce or represent collections

of those elements we ordinarily call sensations. That is the connection of these

elements ". Here our positions diverge, because, as we have pursued through the

earlier pages, if there are sensations as well as properties and accidents, these will

have to be referred to something. As long as we deny solipsism (thus accepting the

21Nietzsche El nacimiento de la tragedia Alianza, 1998, pag 31.

22Ian Hacking, Representar e intervenir, Paidos, 1996.


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externality) for which we do not have enough space, and we do not jump out of our

creative ability, an issue equally verbose. A different question would be venturing to

say what the object of our ignorance is and what our elaborated fictions (such as

multiple and dynamic forces) are, beyond summarizing them in what has been called:

the being.

The noble aspirations of so many illustrious men of the last three centuries;

determinedto eliminate all kind of opinion from knowledge, as well as any speculative

imagination, in the pursuit of the ultimate epitome of that definitively proven and

objective science; they must face the nobler aspiration for adaptability, to which we

must lean.


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Bibliography:

Primary

-Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971.

-Kurt Gdel, Sobre proposiciones formalmente indecidibles de los Principia

mathematica y sistemas afines, Teorema, 1981.

-Ludovico Geymonat, Historia de la filosofa y de la ciencia,Crtica, 2006.

-Ian Hacking, Representar e intervenir, Paidos, 1996.

-David Hume, Investigacin sobre el conocimiento humano, Alianza Editorial 1999.

-Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994.

-Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, 1982.

-Alfred Tarski, La concepcin semntica de la verdad y los fundamentos de la

semntica, Nueva Visin, 1972.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tecnos, 2007.

Secundary

-Francis Bacon, El avance del conocimiento, 1605.

-J. F. Brown, Sistemas de psicologa : fenomenologa, psicologa de la Gestalt,

psicologa del individuo, Paids, 1966.


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-Rudolf Carnap, berwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache in

Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932.

-Ernst Mach, "The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry", 1986.

-Friedrich Nietzsche El nacimiento de la tragedia Alianza, 1998.

-Bertrand Russell, The problems of Philosophy 1912.

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Truth, Falsehood and Fiction