A CRITERION OF DEMARCATION DOES NOT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEANING AND NONSENSE BUT BETWEEN CONCEPTUALLY DIFFERENT KINDS

1. A CRITERION OF DEMARCATION DOES NOT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEANING AND NONSENSE BUT BETWEEN CONCEPTUALLY DIFFERENT KINDS

OF KNOWLEDGE – IN THIS RESPECT, IT IS A CRITERION OF MEANING.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant’s main intention was to demar- cate justifiable and legitimate cognitive claims within metaphysics in order to

place philosophical knowledge on secure foundations. His much-discussed con- clusion was that all metaphysical cognitive claims that go beyond subjective conditions of possible knowledge remain unjustifiable. As a result of the break-

throughs in the empirical sciences and the advances in the quest to clarify the foundations of logic and mathematics in the 20th century a need for demarcation arose not only with respect to exaggerated philosophical deliberations but also to all non-science and thus to philosophy as a whole. In the process, possible fac- tual knowledge has been restricted to the domain of scientific knowledge alone.

Logical Empiricism employs verifiability as a criterion of meaning primarily to demarcate a meaningful use of language with rich empirical content from empty and therefore meaningless use of language by stating the basis of the validity of experience. In their characterization of scientific statements, the members of the Vienna Circle took a methodological demarcation of scientific method as their starting point, relying on Bacon’s characterization of the natural sciences as inductive sciences. In their view, general statements about nature can only be justified through repeated observations or experiments. This inductive method seemed to be a positive feature of all science. By resorting to this sup- posed characteristic of empirical science, the members of the Vienna Circle wanted to demarcate it from metaphysics. Simultaneously, however, this demar- cation meant to them a demarcation between the meaningful and the meaning- less. It should be noted, however, that their position identifies being meaningful with being empirically meaningful, empirical verifiability – that is, inductive provability through observational statements – being regarded as the criterion.

This characterization leads not only to insuperable difficulties in the demar- cation of what is to be regarded as scientific, but, combined with the view that this exclusively determines the meaning of ‘knowledge’ in general, it also makes its adherents regard all other statements as meaningless or as pseudo-statements.

F. Stadler (ed.), The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives,

80 H ANS J UERGEN W ENDEL

In his critical analysis of the inadequacy of the empirical criterion of mean- ing, Karl Popper emphasized the importance of an adequate criterion of demar- cation:

1. No significant part of science must be excluded;

2. It is problematic to use such a distinction not only to demarcate science from non-science (metaphysics) but also to identify knowledge in general with scientific knowledge.

In his Logic of Scientific Discovery 1 Popper therefore proposed falsifiability as the suitable criterion of demarcation that enables us to distinguish between

scientific and non-scientific knowledge within the realm of knowledge without imposing a verdict of meaninglessness on the realm of philosophy in the way

logical positivists of the Vienna Circle 2 had wanted to. ‘Falsifiability’, Popper says, ‘separates two kinds of perfectly meaningful statements: the falsifiable and

the non-falsifiable. It draws a line within meaningful language, not around it.’ 3 . From this point of view it looks as if this demarcation is indeed of a concep-

tual nature and, in addition, factually important because inadequate demarcation concerns everything belonging to empirical science, as the critique of the empiri-

cist criterion of meaning has shown. When Popper says that it is not important to define the concept of science but to give a criterion that factually distinguishes scientific statements in order to delimit them from other statements, he is not opposing the indication of linguis- tic meaning to the indication of a factual criterion, rather is he opposing defini- tion in the sense of explicit definitory stipulation to analysis in the sense of an explication and clarification of actual linguistic usage.

On closer examination, Popper’s critique therefore does not replace a crite- rion of meaning by a criterion of demarcation, rather it is a critique of an inade- quate explication of what constitutes the nature of scientific method and a pro- posal for a better understanding of the peculiar characteristics of science.

Nonetheless, Popper rejects all opinions which assume that one could possi- bly gain insight into the nature of things by conceptual or ‘Wesensanalysis.’ 4 He

considers all such positions to be forms of ‘essentialism’ – in his view an unten- able doctrine. 5 Such a position assumes that conceptual clarification or definition

enables us to make ‘a statement of the inherent essence or nature of a thing’. 6 A definition in this sense ‘states the meaning of a word – of the name that desig-

nates the essence.’ (ibid.). But to Popper’s mind, questions of conceptual clarifi- cation or definition have nothing to do with knowledge. Definitions are never factual.

If the meaning of terms depends on conventions 7 alone, then all arguments about concepts insofar as they are concerned with cognitive claims turn out to be

fruitless because – according to Popper – definitions can never add anything to our factual knowledge about the nature of things, 8 since the descriptive content connected with linguistic expressions is of a purely conventional nature. For this reason, the argument about concepts or their definitions is, according to Popper,

B ETWEEN M EANING AND D EMARCATION 81

an epistemologically fruitless undertaking. Which is why he says: ‘[...] we should altogether avoid, like the plague, discussing the meaning of words. Dis- cussing the meaning of words is a favourite game of philosophy, past and pre- sent: philosophers seem to be addicted to the idea that words and their meaning

are important, and are the special concern of philosophy.’ 9 Instead, ‘one should always keep to assertions, to theories, and the question of their truth. One should

never get involved in verbal questions or questions of meaning, and never get interested in words. If challenged by the question of whether a word one uses really means this or perhaps that, then one should say “I don’t know, and I am not interested in meanings; and if you wish, I will gladly accept your terminol-

ogy.” This never does any harm.’ 10 What we are really interested in, in Popper’s view, are ’our real problems, are factual problems, or in other words, problems of theories and their truth.’ 11 Thus, Popper wants to have questions of knowl- edge strictly separated from questions of linguistic meaning. On the other hand the criterion of demarcation should in any event be factual if it is to be useful.