(February 23, 2014 at 7:46 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: He said "if", so even if his actual usage of the word is wrong (which I don't believe it is when consulting the Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy), his epic point stands.
Quote:Quote: We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it. The task of philosophical work lies in [...] clarification of problems and assertions, not in the propounding of special “philosophical” pronouncements. The method of this clarification is that of logical analysis.
The foregoing passages owe to a manifesto issued by the Vienna Circle. ... The clarification or logical analysis advocated by positivism is two-sided. Its destructive task was the use of the so-called verifiability principle to eliminate metaphysics. According to that principle, a statement is meaningful only when either true by definition or verifiable through experience. (So there is no synthetic apriori. See Kant, Metaphysics, section 2, and A Priori and A Posteriori.) The positivists placed mathematics and logic within the true-by-definition (or analytic apriori) category, and science and most normal talk in the category of verifiable-through-experience (or synthetic aposteriori). All else was deemed meaningless.
~ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Logical Positivism
It is indeed an important point. It's also a well-known point. You don't get epic points for stating something commonly known.