This is the third part of the series. Here are the other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, and Bibliography.

Here is a very short introduction to philosophers Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and other 20th century views.

Sir Karl Popper view:
He had a prescriptive view about how science must be done: one should give a bold hypothesis to explain phenomena, and, only then, he would empirically test it. If you falsified the theory you would junk it or you would test a theory and get good results. You would continue doing this. As a result, you cannot prove a theory, but it can always be falsified. However, it can never be proven. He thought induction to be fallacious and tried to create a view of science that didn’t use induction.
·We know falsification isn’t sufficient to explain what has been falsified.
·Why doesn’t one just adjust the theory?
·Sometimes evidence or abnormalities can be explained once more data is found. (Example: Neptune was not following Newtonian mechanics in its orbit. The reason why was because of a dwarf planet named Pluto was affecting its orbit. So, Newtonian mechanics was not falsified but Karl Popper’s view of science cannot distinguish the two.)
·Theories are never tested alone but are interrelated to other theories. This principle is called the Duhem–Quine thesis. They are interdependent on one another. That leaves us, then, with the question of which theory is falsified? They are never tested in isolation, whether it be that you’re observing biological structures of the cell and believe that quantum jitters have affected them or something entirely different. So, to solve this, you get your equipment to figure it out. Well, the very equipment you’re using has certain “auxiliary assumptions” that the equipment is working properly. Those are other theories that are accepted to other theories. You may find you get data you don’t like and may suppose it was your lab equipment that was wrong. It cannot be verified whether the equipment is correctly showing us these cells because we cannot verify that it is. You can’t see cells with the naked eye. Which theory was falsified?
·There are an infinite amount of other possible explanations for any evidence. This is known as the problem of underdetermination of scientific theories.
· His view would’ve made a well tested non-falsified theory just as good as a non-tested non-falsified theory. For example, the theory of gravity and the theory that a planet which is 400 billion planets away from the earth has alien colonies are both equally valid. He would later say the well-attested theory is better because it has stood to scrutiny, which gives it more probability. That is where he tries sneaking induction into his view of science.

Thomas Kuhn’s view:
He believed that scientists gather together and accept a “paradigm” or a conceptual scheme. It’s a way of viewing the world, but it’s not as all-encompassing as worldviews are. Scientists popularize a particular paradigm, and it gains ascendancy over others. It then accumulates detailed verification, and these paradigms finally get overthrown after anomalies (which are, after repeated testing, problems that can’t be explained) accumulate. At that point, another paradigm rearranges all the data of the overthrown paradigm. He says that we use these interpretive systems that are prior to the facts. He uses the Ptolemaic paradigm as an example (the Ptolemaic paradigm was built on an assumption that planets traveled in perfect circles). They found that the planets would go in retrograde motion and explained that the planets would go in this perfect spherical motion. They accommodated for this by theorizing that the planets would make little epicycles or spherical motions. They purposefully interpreted this motion within their paradigm. The only thing unacceptable for them to do was to get rid of their paradigm. The scientific paradoxes were building up as this model had difficulties explaining both planetary position and procession of equinoxes. “Thomas Kuhn talked about the history of science is a series of paradigm shifts, rather than progress toward an objectively true understanding of the world. He was interested in the way an older model, for example, the Ptolemaic earth-centered astronomy, eventually have a way to a newer model, Copernicus’ Sun-centered astronomy. It happened not primarily through observation, but through a preference for simplicity and a paradigm that honored the elegance of concentric circles.” Dr.William Edgar.   He goes on to say that the move from one paradigm is irrational because there is nothing outside paradigms to compare paradigms too. He believed no paradigm to be better than another, that they are incommensurable. The Ptolemaic and Copernican are both equivalents to one another. Modern biology is no better than Aristotelian biology. Think of his view like this picture. It can appear as a rabbit or duck but neither one is right or wrong.
·He makes science into relativistic conceptual schemes. It becomes different strokes for different folks: that we do not have a true description of reality. He, as a non-Christian, has no concept beyond a system to regulate facts. So, science results to opinions. Which I think that you can compare a theory to another and that there exist some facts all men can see and know, such as the Sun. The problem is explaining how the Sun got there. At that point, we force our worldviews on the facts.
· A theory riddled with fallacies is inferior to one that is coherent.

Another school of thought is out of the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Logical positivism and Scientism. These schools once had their days of glory. These were reductionist movements of knowledge and purposely made all metaphysical talk meaningless.

1. Logical positivism – the belief that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or is an analytical truth (e.g. there are no married bachelors). The proposition is self-refuting. It is not itself empirically verified nor is it a truth of reason. Logical positivism created the verification principle, and this principle is vague and takes different forms. The principle’s early form was that a statement is cognitively meaningful if it is conclusively verifiable by scientific evidence. It’s just too difficult to verify such universal claims. We know things in our area of experience but not the entirety of our universe. We take Einstein’s E=MC^2 and apply it universally, but we don’t have universal data to prove such.
Another form of this principle is based on Karl Popper’s views on falsification: the statement is cognitively meaningful if it is subject to falsification. The problem is, some scientific claims are not open to falsification: “Black holes exist” or “Unicorns exist.” These aren’t falsifiable because, in order to do so, one would need to prove a universal negative. That’s not the only problem with falsification. Those are found in other places of the article.
Another formulation is that as long as a statement has evidence relevant to its truth or falsity it is cognitively meaningful. This is too generous because there are pieces of evidence for almost anything. There’s evidence for things they were trying to make meaningless (such as ethics, metaphysics, and God). Evidence for God is displayed in the various theistic proofs. We see metaphysical claims focus on the unity or diversity of our experience. Ethics has evidence on the grounds that societies who practice certain activities don’t thrive (e.g. North Korea). This principle is also arbitrary. It takes a bias definition of “meaning” to purposely make other positions meaningless. Another issue is that they disagreed about epistemology: how one comes to know things. Lastly, the verification principle is incoherent in that it is self-referential. It is self-refuting because the principle fails to have cognitive meaning. You don’t have evidence for it.

2. Scientism – the belief that the only propositions that can have that have cognitive meaning are verified by the scientific method. This, itself, cannot be verified by science. It is also dependent on empiricism, which is the idea that all knowledge comes through the senses. Empiricism is self-refuting because you didn’t come to know the truth of that proposition: all knowledge comes through the senses- on empirical experience. Lastly, one may believe all knowledge comes from the scientific method. We know there is no “The scientific method.” This, again, simply is self-refuting. It is not known by the scientific inquiry itself. The only thing empirically proven here is the thick skull of those who hold these views (it has pretty much died out and that’s for the better).

3. Early Ludwig Wittgenstein(Logical Atomism)– This is Ludwig’s attempt to create the perfect language and anything that didn’t fit with his perfect language was meaningless. He would reduce statements to elementary propositions(atomic facts). They are propositions that can not be reduced any further that assert something about the world that is gain from immediate sense experience. These are in subject-predicate forms like “The ball is red.” or “The cat is on the mat”. Ludwig in merely one book wished to discuss all that could ever be said. That the world consists of these “facts” and not of “things”. Things like religion, metaphysics, and ethics are all meaningless to Ludwig. In his view, they can only be passed over in silence. Both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Immanuel Kant had discussed the limits of Reason. They ushered in a period where metaphysics took the backseat to epistemology.
His work “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” is where this comes from. It also is a great example of self-refutation in the history of philosophy. His goal in that work was to show and elucidate the relationship between the perfect language and the world(facts). He reduces all that can be said to facts. The perfect language only states facts. It cannot discuss the relationship between facts and the perfect language. The book was thus meaningless by its own standard. Ludwig was aware of this issue and in writing about it he compared it to a ladder that one climbs up and kicks away to see and transcend these propositions.
Wittgenstein thinking he had solved all philosophical problems ran into another problem. That being of an infinite regress. If the Tractatus accurately describes the relation R between proposition p and the atomic fact A, his description amounts to a proposition p2. If that is the case, then p2 is related to R. It would have a relation R2, but that description itself would need another Relation. That relation would be R3 and it goes on ad infinitum.