Topic Test -Questions and Answers

1. What is logical positivism?

A philosophical movement which puts forward that only statements that can be empirically verified are meaningful

Impacted by Hume's empiricism, scientific development and Wittgenstein's Tractatus

2. What was the Vienna Circle?

A group of logical positivists based in Vienna, developed the 'criteria of meaning'

Members include Schlick and Carnap

Vesey & Foulkes: "they recognised only the positive sciences as valid sources of human knowledge"

3. How did Hume impact logical positivism?

Humes fork: things are true either by experience or by logic, no exceptions

4. What is the verification principle?

   1. Strong form: Only statements that can be absolutely verified are meaningful

   2. Weak form: Accepts statements that have a "strong likelihood" of being verifiable

Both deny the existence of God

5. What are some criticisms of the verification principle?

Unverifiable opinions or emotions are not meaningless, e.g. "I love you"

Ethical and historical statements left meaningless

Laws cannot be absolutely verified, neither can the principle itself

Keith Ward: "If I were God I would be able to check the truth of my own existence"

6. What is the parable of the celestial city?

Hick

Two people on a journey- one believes they will reach the celestial city, one believes they won't

Obstacles on the road- one believes it was a test preparing them for life in the city, one believes it to be a random occurence

Neither can be shown to be correct

Demonstrates that we cannot be sure about religious concepts until afterlife

7. What does Swinburne say about the strong verification principle?

"it is generally agreed to be false"

"all ravens are black": can never be definitively proven or disproven

8. What did Ayer say about verification and God?

"The term 'god' is a metaphysical term. And if 'God' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot even be probable that God exists."

9. What is the falsification principle? Claims and propositions must be able to be falsified in order to be proved wrong

Demonstrated by Wisdom's Parable of the Gardener

Hick: "in order to say something which may possibly be true, we must say something which may possibly be false"

Flew: Religious language "dies the death of a thousand qualifications"

10. What did Flew say about the Falsification principle?

"If there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either."

11. What are some alternatives to the falsification principle?

Basil Mitchell  Parable of the Partisan and the Stranger- belief can be non-rational, a non-propositional faith.   Believers treat assertions as either "provisional hypotheses, vacuous formulae or significant articles of faith"

Swinburne "statements which some people judge to be functional which are not confirmable or disconfirmable"- e.g. toys

Braithwaite Religious language is meaningful because it expresses an "intention to act"

Hare 'Bliks'- "ways of regarding the world that which are in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable"

Vardy "religious language, therefore, calls people out beyond the frontiers of their existing morality"

12. What did Karl Popper say about the falsification principle?

"science is more concerned with falsification of hypothesis than with the verification."

"Any theory that is impossible to disprove is no valid theory at all.'

13. What does Braithwaite say about Religious Language?

'It makes primary use of a moral assertion that of expressing the intention of the asserter to act in a particular sort of way specified in the assertion.'

Challenge Questions - Take it Further!

FOR THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS, SCROLL DOWN TO THE END.

1. TRUE or FALSE? According to the verification principle, only statements that are true by definition or empirically verifiable are meaningful.

2. Which TWO of the following statements are NOT verifiable according to A.J. Ayer’s principles of strong or weak verification.

a. God is love.

b. Bondi Beach in Australia contains more than 1 billion particles of sand.

c. The universe is expanding.

d. Stealing is wrong.

e. Some male philosophers have beards.

3. Which of the following is not a criticism of the verification principle?

a. The principle is itself unverifiable according to its own criteria.

b. It effectively implies that only scientific or mathematical language is meaningful when perhaps there are many different and useful ways of talking about the world and our experience of it.

c. The principle implies that many of the important things in life (e.g. ethics, the meaning of life, whether there is life after death) cannot be discussed and should be passed over in silence.

4. TRUE or FALSE? A strength of the verification principle is that it can make people more aware of the logical status of the statements they are making.

5. TRUE or FALSE? According to Karl Popper, the Logical Positivists had misunderstood scientific method and the manner in which progress in science takes place. For Popper, scientific advances are made not when hypotheses about the world are verified beyond all reasonable doubt but when previously held scientific views of reality are found to be wrong, or to contain errors that leave them needing to be improved. The mark of genuine science is therefore that it is falsifiable.

6. TRUE or FALSE? Popper is saying that you can never finally prove a genuine scientific theory to be true.

7. Which TWO of the following are NOT examples of an area of knowledge that Popper considered to be unscientific for the reason that its truth claims were ones that he considered to be unfalsifiable?

a. Young Earth Creationism

b. Psychonanalysis

c. Marxism

d. Astrology

8. TRUE or FALSE? Later critics of Popper, such as Thomas Kuhn and Isaac Newton, rejected the idea that there exists a single method that is applicable to all science and that could also account for its historical progress.

9. TRUE or FALSE? Flew used John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener to demonstrate that statements made by religious believers to defend their belief in God are non-cognitive because they unfalsifiable.

10. Which other contributor to the later debate about religious language, verification and falsification argued that religious language is non-cognitive but that all of us are affected by non-cognitive, unfalsifiable ideas? One such example he gave (not mentioned in the course notes) was our confidence in the steering mechanism of cars. If we do not trust in it, no amount of successful driving will help us to overcome our distrust and we are likely never to drive a car.

a. RM Hare

b. Basil Mitchell

c. John Hick

11. In that same debate, who argued that religious language is cognitively meaningful because religious believers do allow potentially falsifiable evidence to count both for and against their faith that God exists, even though this does not cause them to abandon their faith?

a. RM Hare

b. Basil Mitchell

c. John Hick

12. Whose parable involves something called ‘eschatological verification’?

a. Flew

b. Mitchell

c. Hick

13. Whose parable has been criticised for not conveying the profound significance of the position we are in when we are trying to decide whether God exists or not?

a. Flew

b. Hare

c. Mitchell

d. Hick

14. Whose ideas have been criticised on the grounds that if some of our basic beliefs cannot be proved or disproved, then all that has been shown is that Flew must be right after all?

a. Hare

b. Mitchell

c. Hick

ANSWERS

1. True

2. a,d

3. c – that was Wittgenstein’s view as expressed in his Tractatus.

4. True

5. True

6. True

7. a,d – these are examples of unfalsifiable branches of knowledge but Popper does not discuss them.

8. False – Isaac Newton lived before Popper. For Feyerabend (see original course notes), there was no ‘scientific method’ that could guarantee scientific progress.

9. True

10. a – fear of flying might be a good further example of the kind of blik that Hare is getting at. NOTE: Hick did not participate in the original debate.

11. b

12. c – In this parable, a theist and an atheist are both walking down the same road. The theist believes there is a destination, the atheist believes there is not. If they reach the destination, the theist will have been proven right, however if there is no destination on an endless road, this can never be verified. In this way Hick brings out an idea that was implicit in Mitchell’s parable.

13. a

14. a