The struggle towards an understanding of theory in information systems - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 5

tainty with the undecided, the exact in contrast to the indefinite. Logical positivism as
an extreme form of empiricism was developed in Europe after the First World War by
what became known as the Vienna Circle, established by Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath.
It was formed in opposition to systems of philosophical thought that the logical positivists
found pretentious, obscure, dogmatic and politically unattractive (such as Hegelian
idealism). Logical positivism was a plea for Enlightenment values, in opposition to
mysticism, romanticism and nationalism (Godfrey-Smith, 2003). A. J. Ayer, G. E. Moore
and Bertrand Russell were responsible for the transposition of the ideas of logical posit-
ivism to England where they had a profound effect, with much of English philosophy
retaining a strong empiricist emphasis ever since.
Many of the Vienna Circle were Jewish and had socialist leanings. They were persecuted
to varying degrees by the Nazis, who made use of pro-German, anti-liberal philosophers,
and who also tended to be obscure as well as anti-liberal. In contrast to the logical pos-
itivists, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party and remained a member throughout the
Second World War. Some logical positivists - Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel and Feigl
- escaped to the United States where they were influential in philosophical development
after the war. There was some softening and re-specification of the tenets of logical
positivism and the later more moderate views are more usually called 'logical empiricism'
(Godfrey-Smith, 2003).
At the base of logical positivism is the famous Verification Principle. This says that only
assertions that are in principle verifiable by observation or experience can convey fac-
tual information and be meaningful. Assertions that have no imaginable method of
verification must either be analytic (tautological) or meaningless (Magee, 1997). Thus,
the two central ideas of logical positivism relate to language: the analytic-synthetic dis-
tinction and the verifiability theory of meaning. The first idea relates to the distinction
between analytic statements, which are true in themselves (basically a tautology), and
synthetic statements, which are true or false in relation to how the world is. The second
idea is that experience is the only source of meaning and the only source of knowledge.
Thus, if a sentence (in a theory, say) has no possible means of verification, it has no
meaning. Scientific statements were to consist of verifiable, and hence meaningful,
claims.
Karl Popper in his autobiography (Popper, 1986) takes the credit for 'killing' logical
positivism as early as 1934 by pointing out some of its mistakes in Logic der Forschung
(Popper, 1934), not published until 1959 in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery
(Popper, 1980). Popper was opposed to the concentration upon minutiae and especially
upon the meaning of words by the logical positivists, and the avoidance of metaphysical
problems. A difficulty with the Verification Principle is that it is neither analytic nor
empirically verifiable itself and therefore, according to its own criterion, is meaningless.
The Verification Principle has the effect of outlawing more or less the whole of metaphys-
ical speculation in philosophy - everything apart from logic. Popper also showed that
the Verification Principle eliminated almost the whole of science. An aim of science is
the search for natural laws, which are unrestrictedly general statements about the world
that are known to be invariantly true: for example, Boyle's Law, the law of gravity, or
E=mc 2 . Popper showed that these laws are not empirically verifiable, acknowledging
that the English empiricist David Hume had made this observation two-and-a-half cen-
turies before. The problem is that of induction: from no finite number of observations,
however large, can any unrestrictedly general conclusion be drawn that would be de-
fensible in logic. For example, we cannot prove 'all swans are black' no matter how
many swans we observe.