LP and the Principle of Verifiablity

Peter Mandik

Valerie Hardcastle writes:

"The term "naturalism" in philosophy arises out of the history of Logical Positivism and, given how the LP (and later rebels) thought of science, the term has developed to mean more than "of nature" or "part of the natural world.""

Recall that Logical Positivism's Verifiability Principle (all meaningful statements are either emprically verifiable or tautological) fell afoul of any attempts at self application--it seemed to be neither tautological nor empirically verifiable.

According to Hardcastle, a theory is naturalistic just in case it is (currently) testable, non-naturalistic otherwise. I wonder, given this way of cutting theory space in two, what side of the cut naturalism will fall on. Is naturalism Hardcastle-style naturalistic?

Pete Mandik
e-mail: pete@twinearth.wustl.edu