Interim period

Carnap versus Popper

pp. 163-182

in: Joseph Agassi, Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The "Vienna Circle" worded young Wittgenstein's philosophy as the identification of language with the language of science. He had claimed to have solved the problem of induction. They had to respond to Popper's new solution to it. They took his solution to be in the framework of Wittgenstein's identification of language with the language of science, although Popper rejected it, as he followed the traditional view of the negation of a scientific theory as unscientific: this is a denial that science is closed under negation (as a language should be). Carnap and Hempel managed to ignore this fact. They then found it easy to prove Popper's theory of science is inconsistent.