One of the main aims of the Vienna Circle was to lay down universal philosophical statements that are true and clarify which statements aren't philosophical and are false. This school of thought is known as 'Logical Positivism.' To do this they would take empirical statements such as 'everybody dies' which are records of experience and verify them using the verification principle. The verification principle is the idea that for something to be true it has to be verifiable with proof, the scientific method. For example 'everyone dies' has been learnt through experience, so far there hasn't been a case where someone hasn't died. This is the protocol that the idea is based on, although it is not impossible for it to be falsified. Opponents of this view-point say that statements are true to individuals, but to avoid solipsism Schlick said that so long as two people can agree on the definitions of words they can have a discussion using the language of science. If two people are arguing over what a trike is, but can agree that 'tri' means three then they can have a discussion.
Descartes is a victim of the verification principle, along with other Romanticists. His famous statement 'I think therefore I am' does not make sense and is tossed aside by logical positivists. Their argument? That you cannot verify that you exist by thinking. This is a sensible approach; by not taking anything at face value Logical Positivists extinguish any statements that can't be proven, leaving us with what they see as the bare facts about the world. These include necessary truths which are truths that are necessary for our understand of our surroundings, but don't tell you anything new. All triangles have three sides isn't exactly enlightening, it's just a truth that exists everywhere in the universe.
The verification principle itself raises some questions; is it a tautology? Was it verifiable by experience?In other words, was it its own worst enemy?
As for the first question it doesn't seem to be. It doesn't leave results as plainly obvious as 'all beginners are just starting,' instead it proves statements to be correct using the scientific method. It creates its own answers, rather than repeating itself. Whether it is verifiable by experience is a different matter, who's to say that the truths that it produces are correct? For years Aristotle's heliocentric theories were taught as facts in the top universities around the world, but over time this has been proven false. We currently study physics alongside Einstein's Laws of Relativity which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but even this has been questioned recently. If we can't verify what is true, how can the verification principle be verified itself?
Karl Popper attempted to answer this question by dismissing the verification process and replacing it with a falsification process. He argues that by falsifying theories with the scientific method we can eventually whittle our way down to the truth. This is a pain-stakingly long process, but one that has been in on-going for centuries. Ideas are there to be disproven, first it was Aristotle, then it was Francis Bacon. Einstein may be next.
But that's not to say that Popper thought that history was teleological and we would end up with absolute truths about everything. He believed that ideas would continue to be falsified and that we would never come to a final conclusion - history may be going somewhere but there was no definitive end that other theories such as Marx's idea of Communism being the light at the end of the tunnel suggested.
As part of the falsification process Popper answers questions that Hume's use of induction poses. He states that science assumes that nature is like the past and things that happened in the past will happen time and time again. This is called induction, but induction itself is not scientific. It begins with an idea and then experiments take control of whether it is true or not. Einstein, he says, allowed people to test his theory of relativity, by doing this he opened his idea for criticism. If his test passed the experiments the theory stood strong, however, if it fails any tests it is immediately falsified and cast aside. So long as I don't float up at any moment, Newton's theory of gravity stands as correct, but it is always being tested.
What is important about Popper is that he understood that everything is potentially untrue. Nothing is unfalsifiable. There will always be something out there, whether it be on a distant star or in the distant future, nothing is certain.
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