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The Problem of Protocol Statements and Schlick’s Concept of “Konstatierungen”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Zhenming Zhai
Zhenming Zhai*
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
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Extract

Traditionally, the proponents of empiricism sought for the starting point of knowledge in sensations that happen to us when we open our sense organs to the world. They analyzed the functioning of human faculties of sensation and cognition and the way these faculties are activated so as to discover the origin of ideas. Thus, they insisted on the priority of particulars to universals in the body of synthetic knowledge, and granted empirical facts the authority of truth. For that reason, they are opposed to the rationalists, who maintained that the most important part of synthetic knowledge is derived solely from first principles or ideas, and that these principles or ideas are “innate”—that reason can ascertain their truth intuitively without the use of the senses.

Logical positivism belongs to the empiricist tradition. However, it distinguishes itself from its empiricist predecessors in a very important way, so that its proponents thought they could overcome the difficulties raised against the older empiricists.

Type
Part I. Logical Empiricism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 15 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

I would like to acknowledge my special thanks to Don Howard, who, in the course of my work, gave me very useful suggestions for the completion of this paper. And I would also like to thank Lin Lin, who provided me valuable technical help in preparing the final version of this paper.

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