Truth, Falsehood and Fiction

Manuel Alejandro Rodrguez Pardo

Proem: I have re-written this essay as an English language writing sample, to show you that beyond the inherent easiness of my statement of purpose, I have sufficient command of this language to deal with much more intricate topics in support of the wide range of my future class contributions.

The present essay aims to show the failure of the inductive method to guarantee objectivity and certainty, through critical analysis of Ayers verificacionsm and Poppers falsifiability. We will attempt a solution which encompasses the relevant problems that are the realism vs antirealism debate as well as its various dimensions. I feel obliged to point that you are dealing with a philosophical creative work. It will include some boldness, for which I apologize.

The problem of induction Human knowledge is supposed to be covered by scientific objectivity since Galileo and Newtons works were popularized in the XVII century. Francis Bacon developed the inductive method largely due to the influence of those works. A method that Augusto Comte would be so prone to implement into his system, to progressively comprehend the world regardless of any first or final causes. Metaphysics could distort the purity of scientific observation which produces the laws of nature in the ultimate positive stage of humanity in the XIX century. Soon acid critics to the inductions inconsistency arose, even obviating the antagonism between positivism and the German hermeneutical philosophy of Wilhem Dilthey or the romantic philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher. David Hume, in mid XVIII century, reported the circularity of a method that requires of itself in order to be justified. The use of induction to justify induction does not look like an acceptable method; nonetheless Hume did not want to destroy Comtean positivism especially its consequences aimed at saving us from metaphysics and allowing us to advance. Hence he strives to save probability from the sinking induction. 1 He lowers the scientific certainty to probability but leaving everything else as it was before. The hypostatic experience is allowed to generate theories which his mitigated skepticism holds under close scrutiny. There are no absolute certainties, but metaphysics must burn whilst the probabilities that science requires relies on the custom. That is Humes line of thought. The neopositivism will then have to face the newer criticism against probabilistic criteria. That criticism conveys that although the probability of a theory

David Hume, Investigacin sobre el conocimiento humano, Alianza Editorial 1999, Seccin 6, pag 90.

increases to the degree to which confirming events take place, one refuting event is enough to nullify that previous probability. And hence it becomes evident that all decisions taken under the guidance of that criterion were mistakes induced by a contingent probability. That is why it is necessary to find new grounds to hold the grand structure of science.

Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. David Hume

Alfred Jules Ayer: The British philosopher can be considered a high representative of the logical neopositivism, especially in his main work Language, Truth and Logic where he develops the milestone of his philosophy which is the verification principle. Ayer is ready to give conclusive reasons to eradicate metaphysics, as were his predecessors in the Vienna Circle. He claims that he could establish a sentence validity attending to the criterion of significance, which consists on whether a sentence has content or it is empty and has to be dismissed as nonsense. Its convenient to point out here, that despite the fact that we are talking about the verification principle, Ayers attention is now focused on significance rather than the propositions truth or falseness. Notice the meaning reduction he performs: The words <<truth>> and <<falseness>> are just affirmative or negative signs on the sentence.2 He develops this purification labor in the same line as Rudolf Carnap did some years before in his article from 1932 The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, CapV, pag 103.

Analysis of Language.3 They configure a brief array of rules that any proposition must fulfill in order to be meaningful. These rules are, of course, beyond metaphysics. And the array is preceded by the old empirical principle which states that there is no meaningful utterance unless it describes what could be experienced. According to this, Bertrand Russell conveyed in 1912: Every proposition we can understand must be entirely formed by constituents that we are already familiar with.4 Ayer shared some ideas with the former philosophers, but he did not go into depth on his predecessors ideas. He did, however, formulate a much more liberal criterion, with which to define the limits of thought. Before any definitive formulation, he argues from, not so normative postulates, and under the same aim that: From empirical premises no over-empirical consequences can be inferred.5 He considers it evident and immediately tries to guess the metaphysical objection, the so called intellectual intuition. But is it really self evident? He seems to forget the origin of some disciplines such as Logic or Mathematics (the consensual formal sciences). They came from the operative intelligence, from the empiricism, but they do not belong to it. They are in a particular over-empirical place, which certainly does not mean their transcendence. He keeps this question unstated until the fourth chapter.6 His solution is a statement against Kant, he considers them analytical and tautological disciplines. Therefore, they dont need to refer to any real phenomenon, but would reveal the relations within the

Rudolf Carnap, berwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache in Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932. 4 Bertrand Russell, The problems of Philosophy 1912, pag 91. 5 Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. I, pag. 38. 6 Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap IV, pag 82.

rules with which we manage our symbols. Formal sciences are hence necessarily true just because they cannot be the other way around. They are tautologies whose predicate is included in the notion of the subject. The author of Language truth and Logic may have considered that we are not facing an over-empirical subject, but an under-empirical one attending to the evident distinction between these two planes. Anyway, it is convenient to ask ourselves a question at this point. Are the analytical structures (self referential ensembles of rules and its vocabulary) independent from the synthetic structures that make the alleged reality of the experience? Or were these analytical structures born steady and self-sufficient in an under-empirical, and scarce in significance, world? Other considerations may help us with these questions. Ayer is committed to the phenomenal theory that understands the things like beams of accidents, in the way of Berkeley or Scout in the XX century. The theory substitutes the theist reference to an absolute which experiences the accidents, for the ensembles of properties formulated by the Gestalt school of psychology: we can accept as an empirical fact that authentic or organic ensembles (of properties) exist.7 Due to the Logic is merely tautological,8 Ayer is free to elude some relevant questions. Accidents for what? Properties of what? These questions would require an analysis, respectful of the definitions of those terms. Instead of asking those questions, he briefly refers to the Gestalt school, which brings to mind the Latin proverb: Excusation non petita, accusation manifiesta (He who excuses himself, accuses himself) due to the speculative origins of the school. Max

7 8

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. II, pag. 65. Vase, que sobre los conjuntos de percepciones de la Gestalt, llega a decir que s algn mtodo analtico la negara, esto mostrara que el mtodo es errneo.

Wertheimer, Wolfgang Khler and Kurt Koffka founded the school upon the studies of the apparent movement of the so called Phi phenomenon. They developed the laws with which the perceptive experience tends to perceive forms. As we can see in its fundamental principle the Prgnanz law (pregnancy) that establishes the perceptive experience tendency to adopt the simplest form possible.9 Needless to say that these laws cannot be the ground for a rigid objectualism, without the subject that the properties require, and therefore without any metaphysical reference. They are not rigid laws or deterministic laws but they still attempt a response to the question; properties of what? Ayer allows himself to stand that, as we said, because he identifies philosophy with a linguistic analysis, and the former is understood as an epiphenomenon of Logic. Which just, to quote Ayer, can be useful to increase our knowledge about the sentences where we refer to the material things, so we can translate sentences of a certain kind (factual content sentences), although there is already a sense in which we understand such sentences.
10

These considerations push us back to the analytical propositions we saw

before. Are they invariable per se? And, are they independent from the synthetic

structures?

Verification Principle The rule with which Ayer determines the language significance is no other than the verification principle. He proceeds as follows. Firstly, he notes that in his view, every indicative sentence will be declarative in its linguistic use, and its sense will have to be

J. F. Brown, Sistemas de psicologa: fenomenologa, psicologa de la Gestalt, psicologa del individuo, Paids, 1966. 10 Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. III, pag. 78.

literal if the proposition that it conveys to is an analytical proposition, in the sense we saw before, or empirically verifiable. Secondly he presents a new criterion of significance in the first chapter of the book, but he will correct it in the introduction, added fourteen years later. That circumstance makes the criteria notably difficult to interpret, however it is still quite helpful. In his first approach to the verification principle, the author distinguished between a strong meaning, linked to the tradition, and a weaker version: A proposition can be verified in the strong sense, when its truth can definitely be established through experience, and verified in the weaker sense, when it is possible for the experience to make it probable.11 As seen in its most general formulation from the introduction, the verification principle stands that a phrase would be significant if it could be known by what observations the phrase came (under certain conditions), to be taken as true or false. In a new twist to encircle and thus fortify verifiability, Ayer added the use of "certain premises" to the process. Now, a proposition would be verifiable (a genuine factual proposition), if we can deduct from it one or more experiential propositions (real or potential observations) along with other premises. Other premises cannot be deducted from such a proposition exclusively. His eagerness to get as close as possible to a valid principle for the actual use of scientific theories, this last definition, gives meaning to any inductive proposition, which did not please him when he wrote the earlier formulation in 1946. He introduces a restriction saying that premises have to be verifiable or analytic. This would again avoid the danger of metaphysics, but making his

11

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Cap. I, pag. 41.

significance lean towards the delimitation of analytics. We discussed the topic in previous lines and we will find in the following lines new and interesting unresolved issues which we will undertake to explain. The delimitations were not likely to satisfy the author, because that correction to which we refer introduces a new reflection on the analytics; more specifically, on the principle of verifiability in analytics: "While the statements containing those terms do not seem to describe anything that anyone has ever observed, a <<dictionary>> can be done, which would be able to transform them into verifiable statements, and the statements that constitute the dictionary can be considered as analytical. So after all, the analytics can be verifiable because it is in a dictionary, which makes it analytical. The arguments circularity and hence its invalidity is unavoidable. He allocates every unsatisfactory statement under the analytical label and closes the file. Are not we clear about the presence, in a dictionary, of terms such as: God ((From lat. Dues) A Supreme Being who is considered by monotheistic religions, the world maker) or Entelechy (Real thing which carries in itself the original cause of its action and tends by itself to its own purpose)? Ayer insists and adds: I consider that the characteristic feature of metaphysics, in the pejorative term of my understanding, is not only that his statements do not describe anything that is susceptible, even in principle to be observed, but also that there is no dictionary where such statements could be changed into verifiable, directly or indirectly. 12 That is to say; the verifiability of the analytic lies in its ability to be circumscribed by the dictionary, and that is precisely what makes analytic the analytics, and also what makes metaphysics

12

Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971, Introduccin 1946, pag. 21

unverifiable. If clarity is the philosophers politeness and the aim was not a display of rhetoric. Would it not be better for Ayer to say: The dictionary shows analytic declarations, which are never metaphysical and always verifiable, to conclude: my arguments are, as I showed, none! Even though, I do not t think we should be too worried about the lack of distinction between science and metaphysics that the authors misdirection would imply, since he says in another chapter: A conclusion that does not follow from its premises, is not sufficient to prove that it is false". However it is enough to say that the conclusion has not been proven. We should not be worried overall because he did not offer also a single argument, to link his lack of ability to reject metaphysics from the plane of meaningful propositions, to his lack of distinction between metaphysics and science.

With regard to the circularity of the revision from 1946 I will ignore it for what is to come with the intention of stressing the most relevant flaw of his theory. Namely, all reasoning, that leads the author to discard metaphysics, assume an excessively limited consideration about analytical propositions. A range we will reconsider before dealing with the verification principle.

The illusion of the worlds illusory could always accompany us within the most real world of them all, but the belief in the reality of the world can accompany us in the most illusory of all worlds. Antonio Machado

Karl R. Popper: Popper also does not agree with the induction to distinguish what is science from what is not, since the inductive verification is limited to observations, it is unable to make universalizations from the regularities detected. Science and metaphysics, under this point of view have not been distinguished: "The reason is that the positivist concept of" meaning "or "Sense" (or verifiability or inductive confirmability, etc.), is inadequate to allow this demarcation, simply because it is not necessary that metaphysics would be meaningless so it cannot be science."13 His arguments against inductivism do not end there: "the principle of induction has to be a universal statement. So, if we try to say that we know from experience that it is true, the same problems that led us to its introduction just reappear. In order to justify induction we have to assume an inductive principle of higher order, and so on. Therefore the attempt to ground the inductive principle on the experience, inevitably leads to an infinite regress ()Kant tried to escape from this difficulty admitting that inductive principle (which he called

13

Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994, pag. 309.

"principle of universal causation") was " a priori valid, but in my opinion, failed in his ingenious attempt to give a priori justification of synthetic statements ".14

The verification principle does not work because it is too intertwined with the inductive method, so one has to find another demarcation criterion (to differentiate between science and metaphysics). It is widely known that this criterion in Poppers thought is falsifiability, although he calls it refutability in some texts: A system should be considered scientific, only if it makes claims that may conflict with the observations. And the way to test a system is, in fact, trying to create such conflicts, namely, trying to refute it. Thus, testability is the same as rebuttal and can be taken as well, therefore, as a criterion of demarcation.15 Falsifiability This new criterion of demarcation allows him to delimitate scientific propositions from pseudo-scientific propositions. Theorists must therefore pursue the falsity, to discover the errors of the theory, and so create a flood of new information which again creates new problems. As indeed what follows is also a problem: The theoretician who is interested in the truth, must also be interested in falsehood. The discovery of a false statement is equivalent to discovering that its negation is true. The presence here of an analytic truth allegedly allows him to recognize the progress of scientific knowledge through falsification.

14 15

Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, 1982, pag. 29. Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994, pag. 312.

Each successful falsification contributes to the construction of new theories capable of repelling successive attempts of falsification. With this method, one should distinguish between the convenience of coexisting and competing theories, and choose those that show greater resistance to falsification. Another difficulty implied by falsifying a theory is about the time when a theory becomes obsolete. Popper regards a theory as falsified from the moment it is refuted, while for Kuhn a theory will only be discarded when it coexists with another, citing Bacon, Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.16 To be fair we should point out that Popper concluded through dialogue with the American philosopher, that the theory (that replaces the coexisting immediately falsified one), should succeed both in the area where the former was successful, as in the area of the field where it was falsified. Despite having found a truth in the logical sense within the falsifiabilistic structure, Popper agrees: "This disposal system can give a true theory. But although it was true, this method cannot establish its truth in any way, as the possible number of true theories remains infinite at any time after any number of crucial tests." This statement diverts from the inductive aspirations, which anticipated the result of natural phenomena from the former ones. It also diverts from the risk of considering that former and present conditions were completely evaluated, and they will intervene again as they did before. What we may ask next is how is it possible that without hope of getting any truth, yet they speak of logical truths, objectivity and scientific progress? Where would it be addressed? These questions force us to introduce his theory of the three worlds. "The world is composed of at least three sub-antagonistic worlds: the first is the physical
16

Francis Bacon, El avance del conocimiento, 1605.

world or the physical states, the second is the mental world or the states of mind, the third is the intelligible world or the ideas in the objective sense, the world of possible objects of thought: the world of theories in themselves and their logical relationships, arguments, issues and situations taken by themselves ".17 Thanks to his theory, the objective world is not directly associated with the scientific world, which in turn is a part of the subjective world (second world), but is the product of man but, not just coming from his whims, it is an autonomous world. Although Popper, finally accepts that the three worlds interact between them, the third being modifiable by culture, not by men. Let me tentatively stress that the distinction made here between the second and the third world, is comparable with the delimitation of analytic propositions in Ayers main work. But, if what has been said up to now is correct then we have to face the relevant issue of, in what sense is the term truth as used by Popper throughout his work. He applies the theoretical formulation of the term developed by Tarski: Arrive at a definition of truth and falsehood simply by saying that a sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects, and false if otherwise (...) the semantic conception of truth does not give us, so to speak, any choice among various non-equivalent definitions of this concept.18Popper notes that this conception of truth is incorrect notwithstanding that there may be others. He simply uses it knowing it is necessary to keep working on it, in its complexity and diversity, but also enjoying the benefit of returning to the intuitive notion of truth as adequacy to the facts, to the things. It is an objective and absolute truth, which he overtly operates, while adopting the Kantian notion of the man
17 18

Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, Tecnos, 1982, pag. 148. Alfred Tarski, La concepcin semntica de la verdad y los fundamentos de la semntica, Nueva Visin, 1972., pp. 33-35.

imposing laws on nature and not the other way round: "Our intellect does not get its laws from nature () but it imposes them on nature a claim that needs to be compatible with the assertion that calls for theories to speak of empirical reality to the extent they impose limits. I believe I have shown the enormous difficulties Popper faces to hold some reality without truth, so then, with the intent to circumvent them, he coined his credibility as an approach to the concept of truth. A notion that represents some measurement of the approach of one theory against another, towards the truth. The inconsistencies of this resource are recognized even by its author, unable to deny the possibility that corroborated hypotheses are increasingly becoming less credible. There seems no way, even in colossal Popperian construction for a realism founded in extrinsic truths. The awareness of the unsolvable difficulties showed by the logical neopositivism (for whose analysis we looked at Ayer as its exponent), does not make the Austrian-British philosopher give up in his mission to preserve science and metaphysics distinction. His criticism is destructive and contains no apparent constructive criticism. Although building is more difficult than destroying, which is in fact the support (once discovered), to his philosophy; the repeated attempt to destroy theories that grounds likelihood. Likelihood (inconsistent if it has no direct relationship with the truth that Popper denies), that emanates from the third world, from the analytical world (where we detect a glimmer of hope placed by the author), in which lies the objectivity that grounds the falsification that distinguishes science, from the mental speculative and illusory phenomena.

The Karl Popper's ontological realism is extremely paradoxical, since it claims that reality exists and is unable to provide some objective truth, just a structure that we generously call arguable. Where there is no more solidity to delimitate the thought, than the scope of the analytics, or third world. Is this something new?

To live is essentially, and before anything else, a structure: a dreadful structure is better than none. Jos de Ortega Y Gasset

Conclusion: The strenuous efforts to overcome the failure of induction, preserving the traditional role of science, have led us through different argumentative structures, which made the theories an aggregate of the empirical experience, through the filter of analytics. This tradition manifests itself as an implicit prejudice where the theories have a secondary and derivative character (probably psychologically motivated by their continuous variations). It is however a wrong bias that shifts the direction of our discussion to barren regions. The empirical experience, as it is well known, is to observe passively or actively (intervening), the phenomena of the externality. This tradition, has invested the observation (originally just watching) with a high status, as a pristine objectivity reminiscent of the "blank slate". We found the opposition to the bias in 1958 in the book "Patterns of discovery" where J. Hanson studying visual observation reveals that the theory is always present and even prior to the stimulation. Hanson claims that "scientists do not see the same thing," referring to Kepler and Galileo (notice that this example encompasses much more than an allusion to the visual cortex), and studies perceptual variations between subjects with different pre-theorizations of the

phenomena, using series of figures characteristic of the psychological theory of Gestalt. His thesis could be succinctly formulated in these words: "The vision is an action that carries a theoretical load. The observation of X is shaped by prior knowledge of X, " or in these other words: Knowledge is in the vision and it is not something attached to it. " Following Hansons examples, like the one of Kepler and Galieo, and the fact that the laws of the composition of the Gestalt are not limited to the sense of sight, it does not seem too risky to make a broad interpretation of Hanson's thesis, which encompasses both the perceptions derived from the senses we might call direct (although they are basically mediations) and the indirect from the use of technical instruments such as telescopes or positron emission tomographies. In this sense the extended argument would be: "We perceive the external firstly as mediated by theories." We hear the words we expect to hear, select within the multiplicity of what we see through a microscope based on what we know about its structure, and we move slowly and creatively to a new speculation. What (how could it be otherwise), brings us new challenges. When we track back the chain of perceptions and theories then perceptions and so on, to reach the first insights and guesses; in the early moments we have to guess the existence of some proto-conjectures of the ancestral use. Conjectures that can be detected and traced, in the well documented genetic intuitions or the prenatal patterns of recognition. Once overcoming this bias, I would like to turn to other flaws in these theories that I call traditional. They often intend to take account of the truth (of the reality of the whole world), which incurs a difficult self-referentiality. Here we come finally to the

referred question of the analytics and its treatment and delimitation. We can not justify that a system that defines the Truth would be true. We can not violate the second incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gdel which states: "No consistent system can be used to prove itself".19 Although he is not the only one who recognizes this need. Alfred Tarski in his theory of the mandatory separation between object language and meta-language says: "No philosophical language used could have a self-reflexive meaning," or Wittgenstein himself (the second) in his theory of the anti-theoretical language game: "The language games are only understandable in certain contexts and having a background of a certain lifestyle. Therefore there are no meanings (propositions) related to all language games, since there is only a family resemblance between them". This steady approach can be even found in the logical framework of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" of the early Wittgenstein, when it refers, in that permanently cryptic and terse tone (sensu lato), to the arbitrariness of its notations.20 Therefore, we have the inability to close the analytic field, as it has been claimed, because it requires the establishment of begging questions by way of lists of axioms. Perhaps a prime example is the logical studies of Gotthard Gnther, which calls for a three-valued logic, which was "strong and ductile enough to start to embrace the complexity" and where the principle of the "tertium datur" by which a proposition may be true or false, or something else that participates in both, would be accepted (contrary to classical logic and its axioms). This new system of axioms was proposed after trying to overcome the paradoxes of Church and Gdel's theorems, which in turn Bertrand Russell considered. But this of course, is not the only possible example of
19

Kurt Gdel, 1931 Sobre proposiciones formalmente indecidibles de los Principia mathematica y sistemas afines, Teorema, 1980 y 2. edicin: 1981. 20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus 3.342.

different logics with question-begging flaws. In fact, other logics have been found in different cultures as Jujjien Franois has shown for China, and as does the "Tetragrammaton" the logic of Buddhism in India. Consequently, the eradication of creative imagination or philosophical speculation, including the scope of analytical propositions is a chimera. With no induction, verification, or falsification as a criterion to explain reality, it seems we are obliged to give our consent to a dynamic view of the world. Not a view in the way of the lie that Nietzsche defends: "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the existence of the world justified",21 but in the way of reasoned fiction. Not as an interventive realism of entities such as Hackings,22 but an interventive antirealism of theories as "the art of simulation," aesthetic and creative, as an unrestrained sense of touch. How can we distinguish under this assumption between observable and unobservable entities? With regard, for example, to the widely argued electron phenomena, Ernst Mach responded (when somebody came to ask him about the atoms), "Have you ever seen any?" Despite the many differences between his neo-positivistic proposal and ours, he also argued that atoms like everything else whether observable or unobservable, are mental constructs of perceptions which are consistent in space and time. He adds in another passage: "science can only reproduce or represent collections of those elements we ordinarily call sensations. That is the connection of these elements ". Here our positions diverge, because, as we have pursued through the earlier pages, if there are sensations as well as properties and accidents, these will have to be referred to something. As long as we deny solipsism (thus accepting the

21 22

Nietzsche El nacimiento de la tragedia Alianza, 1998, pag 31. Ian Hacking, Representar e intervenir, Paidos, 1996.

externality) for which we do not have enough space, and we do not jump out of our creative ability, an issue equally verbose. A different question would be venturing to say what the object of our ignorance is and what our elaborated fictions (such as multiple and dynamic forces) are, beyond summarizing them in what has been called: the being. The noble aspirations of so many illustrious men of the last three centuries; determined to eliminate all kind of opinion from knowledge, as well as any speculative imagination, in the pursuit of the ultimate epitome of that definitively proven and objective science; they must face the nobler aspiration for adaptability, to which we must lean.

Bibliography:

Primary

-Alfred Jules Ayer, Lenguaje verdad y lgica Ediciones Martnez Roca, 1971. -Kurt Gdel, Sobre proposiciones formalmente indecidibles de los Principia mathematica y sistemas afines, Teorema, 1981. -Ludovico Geymonat, Historia de la filosofa y de la ciencia,Crtica, 2006. -Ian Hacking, Representar e intervenir, Paidos, 1996. -David Hume, Investigacin sobre el conocimiento humano, Alianza Editorial 1999. -Karl R. Popper, Conjeturas y refutaciones, Paidos, 1994. -Karl R. Popper, La lgica de la investigacin cientfica, 1982. -Alfred Tarski, La concepcin semntica de la verdad y los fundamentos de la semntica, Nueva Visin, 1972. -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tecnos, 2007.

Secundary

-Francis Bacon, El avance del conocimiento, 1605. -J. F. Brown, Sistemas de psicologa : fenomenologa, psicologa de la Gestalt, psicologa del individuo, Paids, 1966.

-Rudolf Carnap, berwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache in Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932. -Ernst Mach, "The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry", 1986. -Friedrich Nietzsche El nacimiento de la tragedia Alianza, 1998. -Bertrand Russell, The problems of Philosophy 1912.