Notes On Logical Positivism & Popper

• Wittgenstein was against metaphysics because he saw it as an outdated system that needed to give way to a scientific world view.
• His most famous was called Tractatus.
• Wittgenstein believed that knowledge of the world could only be gained through experience. He believed that proposition only had meaning if it could be verified or falsified by experience. 
• The verification principle was used as a weapon against metaphysics. If  two metaphysicians were having a argument about the absolute, they could be silenced by the question ' what possible experience could settle this issue?'
• In this chapter, they talk about 'protocol statements' and from what I understand this means you can have a word that can define a 'experience' thus making the experience a truth because everyone can understand the word. This idea came up with a massive obstacle because the experiences we have via 'protocols' appear to be private to the individual. Therefore if meaning depends on verification and each individual person carries out verification by a process that no one else can access, how is it possible that anyone can understand anyone elses meaning ? Schlick  tried to answer this using form and content. But I'm going to use my own example for what Schlick said. If  I see a purple piece of paper and a yellow piece of paper this private and incommunicable. But the form or structure of experience may be common to many. When I see a ball, someone else may see something different when they see it, but as long as we decide to call it a ball, it will always be a ball when we communicate that word between each other.I believe that this is true to a certain extend, reason being this is how we have developed language and an understanding amongst our society. But I think that it would not be accurate to say that every culture or country across the world have the same meanings or name for things that translate the same as we do, for all our words. For example, a ball may have the same meaning as a pillow or may be called a pillow in another country once translated. To put it simple, I don't think words translate into the same word worldwide.
• Wittgenstein believed that Philosophy doesn't discover any new truths and philosophical problems are not solved by the acquisition of any new information, but by the rearrangement of what we already know. Wittgenstein once said that the function of philosophy is to untie the knots in our thinking.
• Wittgenstein left the copyright of his literary  to his three former students: Georg Henrick von wright, Elizebeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees. 
• Quine believed that there were logically true statements, these were statement that would remain true under any interpretation of their non-logical terms. example, 'no unmarried men are married'. He believed that we could not move from a logically true statement to the allegedly analytic statement 'no bachelor is married' because that depends on taking 'unmarried man' and bachelor as synonymous.
• More to come.........

Notes On Our 2nd lecture

• Karl Popper (1902-1994) was born in Austria and part of the Vienna circle.
• His key book- logic of scientific discovery, was an attack on empiricism.
• The Vienna circle members Schlick, Neurath et all were against romanticism and metaphysics. They thought philosophy was in a bad state, they used science to clean up philosophy.
• Locke- we come into the world with a blank slate, no innate ideas. This is empiricism.
• Hume- no matter how much data we have we can never predict whats going to happen in the future.
• Popper realised that everything had the potential to be falsifiable. 
• Popper said that science has never really worked by induction anyway.
• Popper thinks that what we think is knowlegde, isn't actually knowledge.
• Copyright started back in 1640.
• To get something of yours copyrighted, you need to get it published first.
• At night when the Eifel tower is lit up it is copyrighted because the company that owns the lighting for the tower had their lighting design copywrighted.
• The performance rights society made google pay for the right for music to be played on youtube. Youtube is not free.