ecology), it's less clear that theory-ladenness is not a grave practical as well as theoretical concern. Note that empirical scientists, to great success, have basically taken this pragmatic approach Kuhn* notwithstanding, issues of theory-laden perspective even in case of revolution basically don't come up in the harder sciences because of how strongly constrained the entire theoretical framework is by all the data we've collected.įor less data-constrained sciences (e.g.

It would be very difficult, for instance, to survive as a human without any concept of something akin to 'fall' (or 'object', or 'ground').Īs far as I can tell, the anti-Evil Demon manoeuvre (which basically involves the pragmatic decision to ignore the argument) hasn't been sufficiently vigorously explored with regards to logical positivism. This does not mean one should take this as a serious criticism any more than one should take the Evil Demon as a serious argument that all empirical knowledge is bankrupt. If you have somehow arranged things so as to have no concept of 'fall'-not even any good way to translate it-then, indeed, the statement can't even be interpreted. What is an object? What is it to fall? What is the ground? You need to have some sort of framework for those things to even interpret the sentence. But let's just take the statement at face value, and not make any 'sensible' assumptions: 'All objects fall to the ground.'

You are probably assuming that the statement is true without having to posit ludicrous assumptions.

Observation theory