Magni Formica Laboris

From Ladyman: 1) Science is the only intellectually respectable form of inquiry. 2) All truths are either: (a) analytic, a priori and necessary (tautological) or (b) synthetic, a posteriori and contingent.* 3) So far as knowledge goes, it is either purely formal and analytic, such as math and logic, or it is a kind of empirical science.* 4) The purpose of philosophy is to explicate the structure or logic of science. Philosophy is really the epistemology of science and analyzing concepts.** 5) Logic is to be used to express precisely the relationships between concepts. 6) The verifiability criterion of meaning : a statement is literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. 7) The Verification Principle : the meaning of a non-tautological statement is its method of verification; that is, the way in which it can be shown to be true by experience. * - Godel's Incompleteness Proof seems to undo these two tenets, or at least to obfuscate t...

Excerpt about this scientific outlook in Ladyman , James, Understanding Philosophy of Science , Routledge 2002. "The constructive empiricism of van Fraassen has provoked renewed debate about scientific realism. Van Fraassen is happy to accept the semantic and metaphysical components of scientific realism...but he denies the epistemic component. He thinks that scientific theories about unobservables should be taken literally, and are true or false in the correspondence sense, depending on whether the entities they describe are part of the mind-independent world. However, he argues that acceptance of the best theories in modern science does not require belief in the entities postulated by them, and that the nature and success of modern science relative to its aims can be understood without invoking the existence of such entities. "Van Fraassen defines scientific realism as follows: 'Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world ...