106-442: New Lands is the second nonfiction book of the author Charles Fort , published in 1923. It deals primarily with astronomical anomalies and has been described as "largely a satirical attack upon the pomposity of astronomers". In the first part of the book, Fort criticises astronomy, listing predictions astronomers made that never came true. He also continues his attacks on scientific dogma , begun in his previous book The Book of
212-477: A correspondence theory of truth (versus a coherence theory of truth ). Wittgenstein's influence also shows in some versions of the verifiability principle . In tractarian doctrine, truths of logic are tautologies , a view widely accepted by logical positivists who were also influenced by Wittgenstein's interpretation of probability although, according to Neurath, some logical positivists found Tractatus to contain too much metaphysics. Gottlob Frege began
318-608: A logical syntax . A scientific theory would be stated with its method of verification, whereby a logical calculus or empirical operation could verify its falsity or truth . In the late 1930s, logical positivists fled Germany and Austria for Britain and the United States. By then, many had replaced Mach's phenomenalism with Otto Neurath 's physicalism , whereby science's content is not actual or potential sensations, but instead consists of entities that are publicly observable. Rudolf Carnap , who had sparked logical positivism in
424-406: A "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness". Fort was skeptical of sciences and wrote his own mocking explanations to defy scientists who used traditional methods. In a review of Lo! , The New York Times wrote: "Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler returns to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off,
530-440: A grocer, was an authoritarian, and in his unpublished autobiography Many Parts, Fort mentions the physical abuse he endured from his father. Fort's biographer, Damon Knight , suggested that his distrust of authority began in his treatment as a child. Fort developed a strong sense of independence during his early years. As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist , collecting sea shells , minerals, and birds. Although Fort
636-400: A group would be spiritualists, zealots, and those opposed to a science that rejected them; it would attract those who believed in their chosen phenomena—an attitude exactly contrary to Forteanism. Fort did hold unofficial meetings and had a long history of getting together informally with many of New York City's literati such as Dreiser and Hecht at their apartments, where they would talk, have
742-603: A meal, and then listen to brief reports. The magazine Fortean Times (first published in November 1973) is a proponent of Fortean journalism, combining humor, skepticism, and serious research into subjects that scientists and other respectable authorities often disdain. Another such group is the International Fortean Organization (INFO), which was formed during the early 1960s (incorporated in 1965) by brothers and writers Ron and Paul Willis, who acquired much of
848-580: A merely true regularity—for instance, George always carries only $ 1 bills in his wallet —a law suggests what must be true, and is consequent of a scientific theory 's axiomatic structure. ) By the Humean empiricist view that humans observe sequences of events, (not cause and effect, as causality and causal mechanisms are unobservable), the DN model neglects causality beyond mere constant conjunction , first event A and then always event B . Hempel's explication of
954-714: A new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature." Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to as occult , supernatural , and paranormal . Reported events include teleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with inventing), falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials , spontaneous human combustion , ball lightning (a term explicitly used by Fort), poltergeist events, unaccountable noises and explosions, levitation , unidentified flying objects , unexplained disappearances , giant wheels of light in
1060-550: A piece of "crank literature". New Lands was published by Boni & Liveright in 1923. It had poor sales - which led to Boni & Liveright turning down Fort's next book for publication. New Lands is available in Dover Publications ' The Complete Works of Charles Fort with Fort's other paranormal writings. A paperback version was published in the 1990s. An edited online version is also available. Charles Fort Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932)
1166-432: A pillar of scientism , Carl Hempel was key in establishing the subdiscipline of the philosophy of science, where Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper brought in the era of postpositivism . John Passmore found logical positivism to be "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". Logical positivism's fall reopened the debate over the metaphysical merit of scientific theory, whether it can offer knowledge of
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#17328450726931272-408: A point of reference for those who engage in such studies today. More than a few modern authors of fiction and nonfiction who have written about the influence of Fort are sincere devotees of Fort. One of the most notable is British philosopher John Michell, who wrote the introduction to the edition of Lo! , published by John Brown in 1996. Michell says: "Fort, of course, made no attempt at defining
1378-448: A priori knowledge. Logical positivists rejected Kant's synthetic a priori , and adopted Hume's fork , whereby a statement is either analytic and a priori (thus necessary and verifiable logically) or synthetic and a posteriori (thus contingent and verifiable empirically). Early, most logical positivists proposed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. In
1484-401: A priori ), whereas truths by states of actualities (concrete) always align on the other side (synthetic, contingent, a posteriori ). Of any treatises containing neither, Hume orders, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion". Thus awakened from "dogmatic slumber", Immanuel Kant quested to answer Hume's challenge—but by explaining how metaphysics
1590-424: A sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels." By contrast, Jerome Clark , wrote that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of human beings'—especially scientists'—claims to ultimate knowledge". Clark described Fort's writing style as
1696-473: A short chapter in his book Failure, a Writer's Life on Charles Fort, characterising Fort's prose as "well-nigh unreadable, yet strangely exhilarating". Noted UK paranormalist, Fortean, and ordained priest Lionel Fanthorpe presented the Fortean TV series on Channel 4 , between 1997 and 1998. Paul Thomas Anderson 's popular movie Magnolia (1999) has an underlying theme of unexplained events, taken from
1802-481: A syndicated newspaper panel series named Ripley's Believe It or Not! Wilson called Fort's writing style "atrocious" and "almost unreadable", yet despite his objections to Fort's prose, he allowed that "the facts are certainly astonishing enough." In the end, Fort's work gave him "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in
1908-533: A tenement tale, was published. Reviews were mostly positive, but it was unsuccessful commercially. During 1915, Fort began to write two books, titled X and Y , the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization extant at the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser , who tried to get them published, but to no avail. Discouraged, Fort burnt
2014-531: A universal language that could reconstruct mathematics and thereby encode physics. Yet Kurt Gödel 's incompleteness theorem showed this impossible except in trivial cases, and Alfred Tarski 's undefinability theorem shattered all hopes of reducing mathematics to logic. Thus, a universal language failed to stem from Carnap's 1934 work Logische Syntax der Sprache ( Logical Syntax of Language ). Still, some logical positivists, including Carl Hempel, continued support of logicism. In Germany, Hegelian metaphysics
2120-503: A world-view, but the evidence he uncovered gave him an 'acceptance' of reality as something far more magical and subtly organized than is considered proper today." Stephen King also uses the works of Fort to illuminate his main characters, notably It and Firestarter . In Firestarter , the parents of a pyrokinetically gifted child are advised to read Fort's Wild Talents rather than the works of baby doctor Benjamin Spock . Loren Coleman
2226-499: Is corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Popper thus acknowledged the value of the positivist movement's emphasis on science but claimed that he had "killed positivism". Although an empiricist, American logician Willard Van Orman Quine published the 1951 paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", which challenged conventional empiricist presumptions. Quine attacked
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#17328450726932332-418: Is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of meaning). This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers , scientists , and mathematicians formed
2438-693: Is a well-known cryptozoologist , author of The Unidentified (1975) dedicated to Fort, and Mysterious America , which Fortean Times termed a Fortean classic. Coleman terms himself the first Vietnam era conscientious objector to base his pacificist ideas on Fortean thoughts. Jerome Clark has described himself as a "skeptical Fortean". Mike Dash is another Fortean, bringing his historian's training to bear on all manner of odd reports, while being careful to avoid uncritically accepting any orthodoxy, be it that of fringe devotees or mainstream science. Science-fiction writers of note including Philip K. Dick , Robert Heinlein , and Robert Anton Wilson were also fans of
2544-704: Is an exaggeration. Rather, most neopositivists viewed talk of unobservables as metaphorical or elliptical: direct observations phrased abstractly or indirectly. So theoretical terms would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules , and thereby theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws . Via Bertrand Russell 's logicism , reducing mathematics to logic, physics ' mathematical formulas would be converted to symbolic logic . Via Russell's logical atomism , ordinary language would break into discrete units of meaning. Rational reconstruction , then, would convert ordinary statements into standardized equivalents, all networked and united by
2650-480: Is indicated only in Schlick 1936a.) A second element that began to do so soon was the recognition of the problem of the irreducibility of disposition terms to observation terms ... A third element was that disagreement arose as to whether the in-principle verifiability or support turned on what was merely logically possible or on what was nomologically possible, as a matter of physical law etc. A fourth element, finally,
2756-406: Is portrayed by Andrew Leman . American crime and science-fiction author Fredric Brown included an excerpt from Fort's book Wild Talents as an epigraph to his novel Compliments of a Fiend . In that quote, Fort speculated about the disappearance of two people named Ambrose and wondered "was someone collecting Ambroses?" Brown's novel concerns the disappearance of a character named Ambrose, and
2862-542: Is possible. Eventually, in his 1781 work , Kant crossed the tines of Hume's fork to identify another range of truths by necessity— synthetic a priori , statements claiming states of facts but known true before experience—by arriving at transcendental idealism , attributing the mind a constructive role in phenomena by arranging sense data into the very experience of space , time , and substance . Thus, Kant saved Newton's law of universal gravitation from Hume's problem of induction by finding uniformity of nature to be
2968-485: Is restricted to Basissätze / Beobachtungssätze / Protokollsätze ( basic statements or observation statements or protocol statements ). Hempel elucidated the paradox of confirmation . The second edition of A. J. Ayer 's book arrived in 1946, and discerned strong versus weak forms of verification. Ayer concluded, "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience", but
3074-488: Is true via terms' arrangement and meanings , thus a tautology —true by logical necessity but uninformative about the world—whereas the synthetic adds reference to a state of facts, a contingency . In 1739, David Hume cast a fork aggressively dividing "relations of ideas" from "matters of fact and real existence", such that all truths are of one type or the other. By Hume's fork, truths by relations among ideas (abstract) all align on one side (analytic, necessary,
3180-458: Is verifiable in the weak sense "if it is possible for experience to render it probable". And yet, "no proposition, other than a tautology , can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis ". Thus, all are open to weak verification. Upon the global defeat of Nazism, and the removal from philosophy of rivals for radical reform— Marburg neo-Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology, Heidegger 's "existential hermeneutics"—and while hosted in
3286-410: The pseudoscientific , which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving
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3392-694: The Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle , which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism. Flourishing in several European centres through the 1930s, the movement sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims by converting philosophy into "scientific philosophy", which, according to the logical positivists, ought to share the bases and structures of empirical sciences ' best examples, such as Albert Einstein 's general theory of relativity . Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by studying and mimicking
3498-571: The London Fortean Society , Edinburgh Fortean Society , in Edinburgh and the Isle of Wight . Religious scholars such as Jeffrey J. Kripal and Joseph P. Laycock view Fort as a pioneering theorist who helped define "paranormal" as a discursive category and provided insight into its importance in human experience. Consistently critical of how science studied abnormal phenomena in his day, Fort remains
3604-485: The analytic/synthetic division , which the verificationist program had been hinged upon in order to entail, by consequence of Hume's fork , both necessity and aprioricity . Quine's ontological relativity explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world. Quine later proposed naturalized epistemology . In 1958, Norwood Hanson 's Patterns of Discovery undermined
3710-633: The covering law model of scientific explanation . And ultimately, by supplying boundary conditions and supplying bridge laws within the covering law model, all the special sciences' laws would reduce to fundamental physics , the fundamental science . After World War II, key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability principle, and the fact/value gap , drew escalated criticism. The verifiability criterion made universal statements 'cognitively' meaningless, and even made statements beyond empiricism for technological but not conceptual reasons meaningless, which
3816-460: The explanans . Explanans must be true or highly confirmed, contain at least one law, and entail the explanandum. Thus, given initial conditions C 1 , C 2 , ..., C n plus general laws L 1 , L 2 , ..., L n , event E is a deductive consequence and scientifically explained. In the DN model, a law is an unrestricted generalization by conditional proposition— If A, then B —and has empirical content testable. (Differing from
3922-933: The problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible, and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction , whose inference form is denying the consequent , Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions. Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific —a label not in itself unfavorable. Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values. Popper disparages
4028-477: The 1920s and '30s works of Charles Fort. Fortean author Loren Coleman has written a chapter about this motion picture, entitled "The Teleporting Animals and Magnolia ", in one of his recent books. The film has many hidden Fortean themes, notably "falling frogs". In one scene, one of Fort's books is visible on a table in a library and an end credit thanks him by name. In the 2011 film The Whisperer in Darkness , Fort
4134-447: The 1930s, Otto Neurath had argued for nonfoundationalism via coherentism by likening science to a boat ( Neurath's boat ) that scientists must rebuild at sea. ) Although Kuhn's thesis itself was attacked even by opponents of neopositivism, in the 1970 postscript to Structure , Kuhn asserted, at least, that there was no algorithm to science—and, on that, even most of Kuhn's critics agreed. Powerful and persuasive, Kuhn's book, unlike
4240-424: The 1936 and 1937 papers "Testability and meaning", individual terms replace sentences as the units of meaning. Further, theoretical terms no longer need to acquire meaning by explicit definition from observational terms: the connection may be indirect, through a system of implicit definitions. Carnap also provided an important, pioneering discussion of disposition predicates. The logical positivists' initial stance
4346-506: The 1960s. Yet the movement failed to resolve its central problems, and its doctrines were increasingly criticized, most trenchantly by Willard Van Orman Quine , Norwood Hanson , Karl Popper , Thomas Kuhn , and Carl Hempel . Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , by the young Ludwig Wittgenstein , introduced the view of philosophy as "critique of language", offering the possibility of a theoretically principled distinction of intelligible versus nonsensical discourse. Tractatus adhered to
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4452-559: The Circle was Karl Popper , whom Neurath nicknamed the "Official Opposition". Carnap and other Vienna Circle members, including Hahn and Neurath, saw need for a weaker criterion of meaningfulness than verifiability. A radical "left" wing—led by Neurath and Carnap—began the program of "liberalization of empiricism", and they also emphasized fallibilism and pragmatics , which latter Carnap even suggested as empiricism's basis. A conservative "right" wing—led by Schlick and Waismann —rejected both
4558-578: The DN model held natural laws —empirically confirmed regularities—as satisfactory and, if formulated realistically, approximating causal explanation. In later articles, Hempel defended the DN model and proposed a probabilistic explanation, inductive-statistical model (IS model). the DN and IS models together form the covering law model , as named by a critic, William Dray . Derivation of statistical laws from other statistical laws goes to deductive-statistical model (DS model). Georg Henrik von Wright , another critic, named it subsumption theory , fitting
4664-556: The Damned (1919), influenced numerous science-fiction writers with their skepticism and as sources of ideas. "Fortean" phenomena are events which seem to challenge the boundaries of accepted scientific knowledge, and the Fortean Times (founded as The News in 1973 and renamed in 1976) investigates such phenomena. Fort was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, of Dutch ancestry. His father,
4770-567: The Damned , citing a number of mysterious stars and planets that scientists failed to account for. Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea – a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth – as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. As evidence, in the second part of the book, he cites a number of anomalous phenomena, including strange " mirages " of land masses, groups of people, and animals in
4876-567: The English-speaking world and reintroducing empiricism in Britain. Its influence extended beyond philosophy, particularly in psychology and social sciences. What Carnap later called the 'liberalization of empiricism' was underway and different camps became discernible within the Circle ;... In the first place, this liberalization meant the accommodation of universally quantified statements and
4982-400: The English-speaking world. Concerning reality , the necessary is a state true in all possible worlds —mere logical validity —whereas the contingent hinges on the way the particular world is. Concerning knowledge , the a priori is knowable before or without, whereas the a posteriori is knowable only after or through, relevant experience. Concerning statements , the analytic
5088-479: The Fortean Society included prominent science-fiction writers such as Knight and Eric Frank Russell . Fort, however, rejected the society and refused the presidency, which went to his friend Dreiser; he was lured to its inaugural meeting by false telegrams. As a strict nonauthoritarian, Fort refused to establish himself as an authority, and further objected on the grounds that those who would be attracted by such
5194-525: The New York Public Library, where they are still available to researchers. Material created by Fort has also survived as part of the papers of Theodore Dreiser, held at the University of Pennsylvania. From this research, Fort wrote four books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). One book was written between New Lands and Lo! but it
5300-746: The Reading Room of the British Museum . Fort lived most of his life in the Bronx. He was, like his wife, fond of movies, and often took her from their Ryer Avenue apartment to a movie theater nearby, stopping at an adjacent newsstand for an arm full of various newspapers. Fort frequented the parks near the Bronx, where he sifted through piles of clippings. He often rode the subway down to the main Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he spent many hours reading scientific journals, newspapers, and periodicals from around
5406-682: The Vienna Circle, had sought to replace verification with simply confirmation . With World War II's close in 1945, logical positivism became milder, logical empiricism , led largely by Carl Hempel , in America, who expounded the covering law model of scientific explanation. Logical positivism became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy , and dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world , including philosophy of science , while influencing sciences, but especially social sciences , into
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#17328450726935512-706: The accepted theories and beliefs of the time. Fort took thousands of notes during his lifetime. In his undated short story "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman" (first published by the International Fortean Organization in issue No. 70 of the INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown ), Fort spoke of having often toyed with the idea of burning a collection of some 48,000 notes, and of one day letting "several" notes be blown away by
5618-522: The actuality of paranormal phenomena, a belief with which Fort may not have agreed. Most generally, Forteans have a wide interest in unexplained phenomena, concerned mostly with the natural world, and have a developed "agnostic skepticism " regarding the anomalies they note and discuss. For Hecht, as an example, being a Fortean meant hallowing a pronounced distrust of authority in all its forms, whether religious, scientific, political, philosophical, or otherwise. It did not, of course, include an actual belief in
5724-471: The ambition of theory reduction. Logical positivists were generally committed to " Unified Science ", and sought a common language or, in Neurath's phrase, a "universal slang" whereby all scientific propositions could be expressed. The adequacy of proposals or fragments of proposals for such a language was often asserted on the basis of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one special science to
5830-727: The anomalous data enumerated in Fort's works. The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931, by some of Fort's friends, including such significant writers as Hecht, Dreiser, and Alexander Woollcott , and organized by fellow American writer Thayer, half in earnest and half in the spirit of great good humor, like the works of Fort himself. The board of founders included Dreiser, Hecht, Tarkington, Powys, Aaron Sussman , former Puck editor Harry Leon Wilson , Woollcott, and J. David Stern , publisher of The Philadelphia Record . Active members of
5936-413: The basic observational evidence statements of science. While Carnap's focus on the reduction of descriptive terms allows for the conclusive verification of some statements, his criterion also allowed universally quantified statements to be meaningful, provided they were syntactically and terminologically correct (1932a, §2). It was not until one of his Paris addresses, however, that Carnap officially declared
6042-408: The climate of American pragmatism and commonsense empiricism, the neopositivists shed much of their earlier, revolutionary zeal. No longer crusading to revise traditional philosophy into a new scientific philosophy , they became respectable members of a new philosophy subdiscipline, philosophy of science . Receiving support from Ernest Nagel , logical empiricists were especially influential in
6148-456: The division of observation versus theory , as one can predict, collect, prioritize, and assess data only via some horizon of expectation set by a theory. Thus, any dataset —the direct observations, the scientific facts—is laden with theory . With his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn critically destabilized the verificationist program, which was presumed to call for foundationalism . (But already in
6254-566: The extant conduct of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as a movement to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it. After World War II , the movement shifted to a milder variant, logical empiricism. It was led mainly by Carl Hempel , who, during the rise of Nazism , had emigrated to the United States. In the ensuing years, the movement's central premises, still unresolved, were heavily criticised by leading philosophers, particularly Willard van Orman Quine and Karl Popper , and even, within
6360-488: The foreword to New Lands. After Fort's death, the writer Colin Wilson said that he suspected that Fort took few if any of his "explanations" seriously, and noted that Fort made "no attempt to present a coherent argument". He described Fort as "a patron saint of cranks" while at the same time he compared Fort to Robert Ripley , a popular contemporary cartoonist and writer who found major success publishing similar oddities in
6466-661: The kidnapper calls himself the "Ambrose collector" as an obvious homage to Fort. In Blue Balliett 's bestselling children's novel, Chasing Vermeer , Fort is given several mentions throughout the book, such as Fort's Lo! being found and thoroughly read by one of the book's protagonists, and being an inspiration to the main characters. Fort published five books during his lifetime, including one novel. All five are available on-line (see External links section below). Posthumous editions : Logical positivism Logical positivism , later called logical empiricism , and both of which together are also known as neopositivism ,
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#17328450726936572-427: The liberalization of empiricism and the epistemological nonfoundationalism of a move from phenomenalism to physicalism . As Neurath and somewhat Carnap posed science toward social reform, the split in Vienna Circle also reflected political views. The Berlin Circle was led principally by Hans Reichenbach . Both Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap had been influenced by and sought to define logical positivism versus
6678-532: The logical empiricist program was untenable, and it became viewed as self-contradictory: the verifiability criterion of meaning was itself unverified. Notable critics included Popper , Quine , Hanson , Kuhn , Putnam , Austin , Strawson , Goodman , and Rorty . An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung , arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery , directly answered verificationism. Popper considered
6784-465: The manuscripts, but soon began work on the book that would change the course of his life, The Book of the Damned (1919), which Dreiser helped to get published. The title referred to "damned" data that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account, and that was thus rejected or ignored. Fort and Anna lived intermittently in London between 1920 and 1928, so Fort could carry out research in
6890-622: The material of the Fortean Society, which had largely ceased by 1959 with the death of Thayer. INFO publishes the INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown and organizes the FortFest, the world's first continuously running conference on anomalous phenomena dedicated to the spirit of Charles Fort. INFO, since the mid-1960s, also provides audio CDs and filmed DVDs of notable conference speakers, including Colin Wilson , John Michell , Graham Hancock , John Anthony West , William Corliss , John Keel , and Joscelyn Godwin . Other notable Fortean societies include
6996-573: The meaning criterion to be mere confirmability. Carnap's new criterion required neither verification nor falsification but only partial testability so as now to include not only universal statements but also the disposition statements of science ... Though plausible initially, the device of introducing non-observational terms in this way gave rise to a number of difficulties which impugned the supposedly clear distinctions between logical and empirical matters and analytic and synthetic statements (Hempel 1951). Independently, Carnap himself (1939) soon gave up
7102-398: The mind knows only actual or potential sensory experience, verificationists took all sciences' basic content to be only sensory experience. And some influence came from Percy Bridgman 's musings that others proclaimed as operationalism , whereby a physical theory is understood by what laboratory procedures scientists perform to test its predictions. In verificationism , only the verifiable
7208-553: The movement itself, by Hempel. The 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn 's landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dramatically shifted academic philosophy's focus. In 1967 philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". Logical positivists picked from Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language the verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness. As in Ernst Mach 's phenomenalism , whereby
7314-654: The neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer —the then leading figure of Marburg school , so called—and against Edmund Husserl 's phenomenology . Logical positivists especially opposed Martin Heidegger 's obscure metaphysics, the epitome of what logical positivism rejected. In the early 1930s, Carnap debated Heidegger over "metaphysical pseudosentences". As the movement's first emissary to the New World , Moritz Schlick visited Stanford University in 1929, yet otherwise remained in Vienna and
7420-530: The novel which became Sinister Barrier , in which he names Fort explicitly as an influence. Russell included some of Fort's data in the story. In chapter 3 of William Gaddis ’s 1955 novel The Recognitions , protagonist Wyatt Gwyon twice quotes from Fort’s The Book of the Damned --“By the damned, I mean the excluded”; “By prostitution, I mean usefulness”—and paraphrases him from the same book: “Charles Fort says maybe we’re fished for, by supercelestial beings.” Ivan T. Sanderson , Scottish naturalist and writer,
7526-450: The oceans , and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat ). He offered many reports of out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), strange items found in unlikely locations. He was also perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction , and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis , specifically suggesting that strange lights or objects sighted in
7632-458: The only interpretation given to the theoretical terms is their explicit definition provided by the correspondence rules". According to Hilary Putnam , a former student of Reichenbach and of Carnap , the dichotomy of observational terms versus theoretical terms introduced a problem within scientific discussion that was nonexistent until this dichotomy was stated by logical positivists. Putnam's four objections: Putnam also alleged that positivism
7738-453: The positivism but other instrumentalism —whereby scientific theory is but a human tool to predict human observations—filling the void left by positivism's decline. By the late 1960s, logical positivism had become exhausted. In 1976, A. J. Ayer quipped that "the most important" defect of logical positivism "was that nearly all of it was false," though he maintained "it was true in spirit." Although logical positivism tends to be recalled as
7844-649: The principle that is statements cannot justify ought statements, but are separated by an unbridgeable gap. A. J. Ayer 's 1936 book asserted an extreme variant—the boo/hooray doctrine —whereby all evaluative judgments are but emotional reactions. In an important pair of papers in 1936 and 1937, "Testability and meaning", Carnap replaced verification with confirmation , on the view that although universal laws cannot be verified they can be confirmed. Later, Carnap employed abundant logical and mathematical methods in researching inductive logic while seeking to provide an account of probability as "degree of confirmation", but
7950-415: The program of reducing mathematics to logic. He continued it with Bertrand Russell , but lost interest in this logicism . Russell then continued it with Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica , inspiring some of the more mathematical logical positivists, such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap . Carnap's early anti-metaphysical works employed Russell's theory of types . Carnap envisioned
8056-503: The realm of historical and social assessment, rather than fitting it to the model of physics. Kuhn's ideas were rapidly adopted by scholars in disciplines well outside natural sciences, and, as logical empiricists were extremely influential in the social sciences, ushered academia into postpositivism or postempiricism. The " received view " operates on the correspondence rule that states, "The observational terms are taken as referring to specified phenomena or phenomenal properties, and
8162-457: The return, as it were, to salient aspects of Carnap's 1928 conception. Everybody had noted that the Wittgensteinian verificationist criterion rendered universally quantified statements meaningless. Schlick (1931) thus followed Wittgenstein's own suggestion to treat them instead as representing rules for the formation of verifiable singular statements. (His abandonment of conclusive verifiability
8268-433: The same inheritance was divided between Fort and his other brother, Raymond. Fort's experience as a journalist, coupled with his wit and contrarian nature, prepared him for his real-life work, ridiculing the pretensions of scientific positivism and the tendency of journalists and editors of newspapers and scientific journals to rationalize. Fort wrote 10 novels, although only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909),
8374-522: The skies might be alien spacecraft. Fort's work has inspired some people to consider themselves "Forteans". The first of these was Hecht, a screenwriter, who in a review of The Book of the Damned , declared, "I am the first disciple of Charles Fort... henceforth, I am a Fortean". Precisely what is encompassed by the term "Fortean" is a matter of great debate; the term is widely applied to people ranging from Fortean purists dedicated to Fort's methods and interests, to those with open and active acceptance of
8480-463: The skies. Of all of Fort's books, New Lands is the worst-regarded. His speculations (serious or joking, he does not reveal) concerning continents in the sky and the supposed top-like shape of the Earth have dated considerably. It has been suggested that Fort's arrangement of the book - particularly his criticism of astronomers and long-established concepts in its opening chapters - risked it being seen as
8586-504: The social sciences. Comtean positivism had viewed science as description , whereas the logical positivists posed science as explanation , perhaps to better realize the envisioned unity of science by covering not only fundamental science —that is, fundamental physics —but the special sciences , too, for instance biology , anthropology , psychology , sociology , and economics . The most widely accepted concept of scientific explanation, held even by neopositivist critic Karl Popper,
8692-723: The terms of another, putatively more fundamental. Sometimes these reductions consisted of set-theoretic manipulations of a few logically primitive concepts (as in Carnap's Logical Structure of the World , 1928). Sometimes, these reductions consisted of allegedly analytic or a priori deductive relationships (as in Carnap's "Testability and meaning"). A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept. As in Comtean positivism 's envisioned unity of science , neopositivists aimed to network all special sciences through
8798-433: The theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory. Explicitly denying the positivist view of meaning and verification, Popper developed the epistemology of critical rationalism , which considers that human knowledge evolves by conjectures and refutations, and that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. For Popper, science's aim
8904-413: The vocabulary and symbols of logic's formal language , was written in natural language open to the layperson. Kuhn's book was first published in a volume of International Encyclopedia of Unified Science —a project begun by logical positivists but co-edited by Neurath whose view of science was already nonfoundationalist as mentioned above—and some sense unified science, indeed, but by bringing it into
9010-523: The wind because he couldn't be bothered to save them (they were supposedly returned to him by a gentleman on a neighbouring park bench). The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in Fort's cramped handwriting. More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but began anew. Some notes were published by the Fortean Society magazine Doubt , and upon the death of its editor Tiffany Thayer in 1959, most were donated to
9116-419: The work of Fort. Alfred Bester 's teleportation-themed novel, The Stars My Destination , pays homage to the coiner of the term by naming the first teleporter "Charles Fort Jaunte". Fort's work, of compilation and commentary on anomalous phenomena has been carried on by William R. Corliss , whose self-published books and notes bring Fort's collections up to date. In 1939, Eric Frank Russell first published
9222-424: The world beyond human experience (scientific realism) versus whether it is but a human tool to predict human experience (instrumentalism). Philosophers increasingly critiqued logical positivism, often misrepresenting it without thorough examination. It was generally reduced to oversimplifications and stereotypes, particularly associating it with foundationalism . The movement helped anchor analytic philosophy in
9328-793: The world. Fort also had literary friends who gathered at various apartments, including his own, to drink and talk. Fort was pleasantly surprised to find himself the subject of a cult following . Talk arose of the formation of a formal organization to study the type of odd events related by his books. Jerome Clark writes, "Fort himself, who did nothing to encourage any of this, found the idea hilarious. Yet he faithfully corresponded with his readers, some of whom had taken to investigating reports of anomalous phenomena and sending their findings to Fort". Suffering from poor health and failing eyesight, Fort distrusted doctors and did not seek medical help for his worsening health. Rather, he emphasized completing Wild Talents . After he collapsed on May 3, 1932, Fort
9434-462: Was a devotee of Fort's work, and referenced it heavily in several of his own books on unexplained phenomena, notably Things (1967), and More Things (1969). Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier 's The Morning of the Magicians was also heavily influenced by Fort's work and mentions it often. Author Donald Jeffries referenced Charles Fort repeatedly in his 2007 novel The Unreals . Joe Milutis writes
9540-444: Was a dominant movement, and Hegelian successors such as F H Bradley explained reality by postulating metaphysical entities lacking empirical basis, drawing reaction in the form of positivism . Starting in the late 19th century, there was a "back to Kant " movement( Neo-Kantianism ). Ernst Mach 's positivism and phenomenalism were a major influence. The Vienna Circle , gathering around University of Vienna and Café Central ,
9646-597: Was abandoned and absorbed into Lo!. Fort suggested that a Super- Sargasso Sea exists, into which all lost things go, and justified his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations. As to whether Fort believed this theory, or any of his other proposals, he himself noted, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written". Notable literary contemporaries of Fort's openly admired his writing style and befriended him. Among these were: Ben Hecht , John Cowper Powys , Sherwood Anderson , Clarence Darrow , and Booth Tarkington , who wrote
9752-409: Was actually a form of metaphysical idealism by its rejecting scientific theory's ability to garner knowledge about nature's unobservable aspects. With his "no miracles" argument, posed in 1974, Putnam asserted scientific realism , the stance that science achieves true—or approximately true—knowledge of the world as it exists independently of humans' sensory experience. In this, Putnam opposed not only
9858-424: Was an American writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena . The terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are sometimes used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print. His work continues to inspire admirers, who refer to themselves as "Forteans", and has influenced some aspects of science fiction . Fort's collections of scientific anomalies, including The Book of
9964-485: Was described as curious and intelligent, he was not a good student. An autodidact , his considerable knowledge of the world was mainly due to his extensive personal reading. At age 18, Fort left New York to embark on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience". He travelled through the western United States, Scotland , and England , until becoming ill in Southern Africa . When he returned home, he
10070-444: Was led principally by Moritz Schlick . Schlick had held a neo-Kantian position, but later converted, via Carnap's 1928 book Der logische Aufbau der Welt , that is, The Logical Structure of the World . A 1929 pamphlet written by Otto Neurath , Hans Hahn , and Rudolf Carnap summarized the Vienna Circle's positions. Another member of Vienna Circle to later prove very influential was Carl Hempel. A friendly but tenacious critic of
10176-607: Was logically possible to conceive of a procedure of verification; concerned with constructed languages only, Carnap (1936–37) deemed meaningful only statements for whom it was nomologically possible to conceive of a procedure of confirmation or disconfirmation. Many of these issues were openly discussed at the Paris congress in 1935. Already in 1932 Carnap had sought to sharpen his previous criterion by stipulating that those statements were meaningful that were syntactically well-formed and whose non-logical terms were reducible to terms occurring in
10282-999: Was murdered in 1936 at the University by a former student, Johann Nelböck , who was reportedly deranged. That year, a British attendee at some Vienna Circle meetings since 1933, A. J. Ayer saw his Language, Truth and Logic , written in English, import logical positivism to the English-speaking world . By then, the Nazi Party 's 1933 rise to power in Germany had triggered flight of intellectuals. In exile in England, Otto Neurath died in 1945. Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel—Carnap's protégé who had studied in Berlin with Reichenbach—settled permanently in America. Upon Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, remaining logical positivists, many of whom were also Jewish , were targeted and continued flight. Logical positivism thus became dominant in
10388-437: Was never able to formulate a model. In Carnap's inductive logic, every universal law's degree of confirmation is always zero. In any event, the precise formulation of what came to be called the "criterion of cognitive significance" took three decades (Hempel 1950, Carnap 1956, Carnap 1961). Carl Hempel became a major critic within the logical positivism movement. Hempel criticized the positivist thesis that empirical knowledge
10494-531: Was nursed by Anna Filing, whom he had known since childhood. They were married on October 26, 1896, at an Episcopal church . For a few years, the newly married couple lived in poverty in the Bronx while Fort tried to earn a living writing stories for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he began to collect accounts of anomalies. His uncle Frank A. Fort died in 1916, and a modest inheritance gave Fort enough money to quit his various day jobs and to write full-time. In 1917, Fort's brother Clarence died; his portion of
10600-460: Was rushed to Royal Hospital . Later that same day, Fort's publisher visited him to show him the advance copies of Wild Talents . Fort died only hours afterward, probably of leukemia . He was interred in the Fort family plot in Albany, New York. For more than 30 years, Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were not explained well by
10706-529: Was scientific, and thus meaningful (or cognitively meaningful ), whereas the unverifiable, being unscientific, were meaningless "pseudostatements" (just emotively meaningful ). Unscientific discourse, as in ethics and metaphysics , would be unfit for discourse by philosophers, newly tasked to organize knowledge , not develop new knowledge. Logical positivism is sometimes stereotyped as forbidding talk of unobservables , such as microscopic entities or such notions as causality and general principles, but that
10812-469: Was taken to pose significant problems for the philosophy of science. These problems were recognized within the movement, which hosted attempted solutions—Carnap's move to confirmation , Ayer's acceptance of weak verification —but the program drew sustained criticism from a number of directions by the 1950s. Even philosophers disagreeing among themselves on which direction general epistemology ought to take, as well as on philosophy of science , agreed that
10918-575: Was that a statement is "cognitively meaningful" in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content only if some finite procedure conclusively determines its truth. By this verifiability principle , only statements verifiable either by their analyticity or by empiricism were cognitively meaningful . Metaphysics , ontology , as well as much of ethics failed this criterion, and so were found cognitively meaningless . Moritz Schlick, however, did not view ethical or aesthetic statements as cognitively meaningless . Cognitive meaningfulness
11024-472: Was that differences emerged as to whether the criterion of significance was to apply to all languages or whether it was to apply primarily to constructed, formal languages. Schlick retained the focus on logical possibility and natural languages throughout, but Carnap had firmly settled his focus on nomological possibility and constructed languages by the mid-thirties. Concerned with natural language, Schlick (1932, 1936a) deemed all statements meaningful for which it
11130-448: Was the deductive-nomological model (DN model). Yet DN model received its greatest explication by Carl Hempel, first in his 1942 article "The function of general laws in history", and more explicitly with Paul Oppenheim in their 1948 article "Studies in the logic of explanation". In the DN model, the stated phenomenon to be explained is the explanandum —which can be an event, law , or theory —whereas premises stated to explain it are
11236-551: Was variously defined: having a truth value ; corresponding to a possible state of affairs; intelligible or understandable as are scientific statements. Ethics and aesthetics were subjective preferences, while theology and other metaphysics contained "pseudostatements", neither true nor false. This meaningfulness was cognitive, although other types of meaningfulness—for instance, emotive, expressive, or figurative—occurred in metaphysical discourse, dismissed from further review. Thus, logical positivism indirectly asserted Hume's law ,
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