Ebook: Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge

The ideas of this book have grown from the soil of a philosophic movement which, though confined to small groups, is spread over the whole world. American pragmatists and behaviorists, English logistic epistemologists, Austrian positivists, German representatives of the analysis of science, and Polish logisticians are the main groups to which is due the origin of that philosophic movement which we now call "logistic empiricism." It is the intention of uniting both the empiricist conception of modern science and the formalistic conception of logic, such as expressed in logistic, which marks the working program of this philosophic movement. Since this book is written with the same intentions, it may be asked how such a new attempt at a foundation of logistic empiricism can be justified. Many things indeed will be found in this book which have been said before by others, such as the physicalistic conception of language and the importance attributed to linguistic analysis, the connection of meaning and verifiability, and the behavioristic conception of psychology. This fact may in part be justified by the intention of giving a report of those results which may be considered today as a secured possession of the philosophic movement described; however, this is not the sole intention. If the present book enters once more into the discussion of these fundamental problems, it is because former investigations did not sufficiently take into account one concept which penetrates into all the logical relations constructed in these domains: that is, the concept of probability. It is the intention of this book to show the fundamental place which is occupied in the system of knowledge by this concept and to point out the consequences involved in a consideration of the probability character of knowledge. It is this combination of the results of my investigations on probability with the ideas of an empiricist and logistic conception of knowledge which I here present as my contribution to the discussion of logistic empiricism. The growth of this movement seems to me sufficiently advanced to enter upon a level of higher approximation; and what I propose is that the form of this new phase should be a probabilistic empiricism.