ERROR IN UNDERSTANDING: OPERATIONALISM IS CRITICISM, NOT JUSTIFICATION —“Opera

http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Operationalism.pdfTHE ERROR IN UNDERSTANDING: OPERATIONALISM IS CRITICISM, NOT JUSTIFICATION

—“Operational definitions were a neo-Machean development that connected with the positivism of Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism failed, with the failure of operational definitions being just one of multiple and multifarious failures of Logical Positivism more broadly.”—

The tragedy is that operationalism failed.

The depth of this tragedy is one of the great intellectual failures of human History.

Operational definitions test the existential possibility of our premises.

All those great minds failed.

And the twentieth century was an age of pseudoscience because of it.

What could we have done without a century of marxism, socialism, postmodernism, freudian psychology, Boazian anthropology, Keynesian justification of theft, Rawlsian deception, Cantorian sets, and the pseudoscientific attacks on physics? Would philosophy have been lost had we saved it with operations? I think so.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF FAILURE