Abstract
IN a most timely article entitled "Positivism" (Mind, July 1944), Prof. W. T. Stace throws great light on the doctrinaire character of the so-called logical positivists. After making a useful distinction between the 'meaning' of a word and the 'significance' of a sentence, he states the positivist principle as follows: "what makes a sentence significant is that some actual or possible observation can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises, without being deducible from those other premises alone". He then makes his main point, that underlying this principle is another one more fundamental, which he calls the "Principle of Observable Kinds", and states as follows, "a sentence, to be significant, must assert or deny facts of a kind such that it is logically possible directly to observe some facts which are instances of that kind".
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Pitfalls of Positivism. Nature 154, 542 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154542c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154542c0