User:Alshalash1/sandbox

= Article Evaluation: Interpretation (philosophy) = I evaluated the article Interpretation (philosophy), and specifically the scientific interpretation part of the article.

Content
The content of the article is quite sparse. Though everything seems to be on topic, I have no sense of how up-to-date the article is because there are few, if any sources. A lot could be improved to make this article fuller and more informative. Most pressingly, the article just needs more information and sourcing in nearly ever section and subsection.

Neutrality
Once again, it was unclear how neutral the article was. It did not appear to be heavily biased, but no sources were provided. Only one or two explanations for each kind of interpretation was provided.

Talk Page
The talk page is blank. The article has not received an importance rating, but it is a part of the Wikipedia Philosophy project.

= The Demarcation Problem =

Logical positivism
Logical positivism, formulated in the 1920s, held that only statements about matters of fact or logical relations between concepts are meaningful. All other statements lack sense and are labelled "metaphysics" (see the verifiability theory of meaning also known as verificationism).

'''According to A.J. Ayer, metaphysicians make statements which claim to have "knowledge of a reality which [transcends] the phenomenal world." Ayer, a member of the Vienna Circle and a noted English logical-positivist, argues that making any statements about the world beyond one's immediate sense-perception is impossible. This is because even metaphysician's first premises will necessarily begin with observations made through sense-perception. '''

'''Ayer implies that the line of demarcation is characterized as the place at which statements become "factually significant." To be "factually significant," a statement must be verifiable. In order to be verifiable, the statement must be verifiable in the observable world, or facts that can be induced from "derived experience." This is referred to as the "verifiability" criterion. '''

This distinction between science, which in the view of the Vienna Circle possessed empirically verifiable statements, and what they pejoratively called "metaphysics", which lacked such statements, can be seen as representing another aspect of the demarcation problem. Logical positivism is often discussed in the context of the demarcation between science and non-science or pseudoscience. However, "The verificationist proposals had the aim of solving a distinctly different demarcation problem, namely that between science and metaphysics."

Falsifiability
'''Karl Popper saw demarcation as a central problem in the philosophy of science. Popper articulates the problem of demarcation as:'''

"The problem of finding a criterion which would enable us to distinguish between the empirical sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and logic as well as 'metaphysical' systems on the other, I call the problem of demarcation."

'''Falsifiability is the demarcation criterion proposed by Karl Popper as opposed to verifiability: "statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations". '''

Against Verifiability
'''Popper rejected solutions to the problem of demarcation that are grounded in inductive reasoning, so rejects logical-positivist responses to the problem of demarcation. He argues that logical-positivists like Ludwig Wittgenstein want to create a demarcation between the metaphysical and the empirical because they believe that empirical claims are meaningful and metaphysical ones are not. Unlike the Vienna Circle, Popper stated that his proposal was not a criterion of "meaningfulness".'''

"Popper's demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science… and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific… According to Larry Laudan (1983, 121), it "has the untoward consequence of countenancing as 'scientific' every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions". Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted… Similarly, the major threats to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, another of his major targets, do not come from claims that it is untestable but from claims that it has been tested and failed the tests."

- Sven Ove Hansson

'''Popper argues that the Humean induction problem shows that there is no way to make meaningful universal statements on the basis of any number of empirical observations. Therefore, empirical statements are no more "verifiable" than metaphysical statements. '''

'''This creates a problem for the line of demarcation the positivists want to cleave between the empirical and the metaphysical. By their very own "verifiability criterion," Popper argues, the empirical is subsumed into the metaphysical, and the line of demarcation between the two becomes non-existent. '''

The Solution of Falsifiability
In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation. He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences," so that a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time. This has been summarized as a statement being falsifiable "if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe."