The principle of verification in the methodology of science

These principles form the main content of the philosophical concept of positivism, later - neopositivism. The scientific principle of verification and falsification was proposed by Karl Popper, one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century.

The initial motive for their development and formulation was Popper's statement that he appears in science as a "critical rationalist" who completely rejects skepticism and relativism. Being an irreconcilable opponent of any totalitarianism, both in social life and in science. Popper made a huge contribution to the development of the philosophy and methodology of modern science, the provisions of which remain relevant today.

As already mentioned, the principle of verification was formulated in the framework of the development of philosophical ideas of positivism. According to this doctrine, the goal of any science is to create a certain empirical basis in which the ambiguity and impossibility of expressing these data with the help of a scientific apparatus are unacceptable.

Popper, as such a universal scientific language, proposes the use of methods of logical-mathematical analysis and a mathematical category apparatus that differs from others in its elaboration, universality, and accuracy. Such a methodology in science was called logical positivism. Logical positivists argued that the empirical basis, as a rule, for any branch of science is formed on the basis of observation.

This idea was publicly announced at a meeting of the Vienna Circle, of which K. Popper was a member, in 1921. The essence of the statement was the following: the criterion for any empirical knowledge is the principle of verification. The content of the principle was as follows: only those facts of science that are grounded in the "scientific primacy" - scientifically confirmed and experimentally verified - are of scientific value and are meaningful and detached from all sorts of side effects that may emanate from the researcher. It should be noted that when the verification principle was proposed, in scientific methodology there were many different points of view on the problem of establishing the truth of science as such. That is why this proposal became a new word in the polemic about the adequacy of the methodology of science and ensured continuation in the following concepts of philosophical positivism (neopositivism).

However, as practice showed, the verification principle turned out to be imperfect and could not answer many questions of the development of science. Its limitation was manifested in the narrowness of the application. So, for example, it was simply impossible to apply this method in philosophy, psychology and some other "non-mathematical" sciences. In addition, its imperfection consisted in the fact that it could be used only by those specialists who possessed scientific instruments, equipment, which could confirm the certainty of a scientific fact. A simple person, this method was not available. And the first person to discover this limited method was K. Popper himself. He noted that many scientific facts are ideal in nature, and therefore can not be objectively verifiable. Therefore, in order to increase the reliability, Popper proposes to supplement the principle of verification with another principle - the principle of falsification.

The scientist proceeded from the statement that science, like everything in the world, is a dynamic system, therefore the task of science is not only to explain the phenomena that occur, but also to explain the changes that are taking place. Priority role in this Popper brought philosophy. The principle of falsification provided for the possibility of verifying a scientific fact or phenomenon by refuting them. This, according to Popper, expanded the methodological possibilities of science.