A2 OCR Religious Studies - Verification and Falsification Principles

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  • Created by: Helen
  • Created on: 14-04-13 19:09
In the late 1920s, a group of philosophers, mathematicians and scientists came together in Vienna under the leadership of who to create the Vienna Circle?
Moritz Schlick
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What school of Philosophy did the Vienna Circle inaugurate?
Logical Positivism
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Logical positivism aimed to design a set of criteria to determine whether a statement was what?
Meaningful or Meaningless
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What influenced the Vienna Circle's Verification Principle?
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus
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What did Wittgenstein believe gave a statement meaning?
If it pictured reality
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The Vienna Circle took this one step further and said that statements that include words such as 'wrong' and 'beautiful' have no objective definition so therefore they are, what?
Meaningless
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Meaningful statements are those which are, what?
Analytic or empirically testable
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What is an analytic statement?
Statements which state the meaning of a term e.g. a triangle has 3 sides
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What is an empirically testable statement?
One which can be proved true or false e.g. it will rain tomorrow
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Therefore religious, ethical and aesthetic language is, what?
Meaningless
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What are they instead?
Expressions of emotion or opinion e.g. 'I believe in God' becomes 'God is real' which although looks like a fact cannot be verified so is meaningless.
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Why does the verification principle contradict itself?
Because the statement 'ethical, religious and aesthetic statements are not empirically testable' is not itself empirically testable.
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Who claimed that religious statements can in fact be verified, by God himself?
Keith Ward
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Who believed that an afterlife can be proven but only to ourselves when we die?
John Hick
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Complete: For any statements to be open to empirical testability, surely they must be...
Meaningful before the tests are applied to them, otherwise, how would we know which tests to apply, where and when?
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Who said that scientific statements are never actually verified but instead not falsified?
Karl Popper
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Scientific statements which we all see as true may in reality not be true but we are just yet to discover this. What is an example of this?
Everyone used to believe that the world was flat until it was proven that it was spherical.
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Who developed Karl Popper's argument into the Falsification Principle?
Anthony Flew
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What influenced Karl Popper?
John Wisdom's 'Parable of the Invisible Gardener"
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What question would Anthony Flew want to know the question to regarding the parable?
What would have to happen in order for the theist to believe that there wasn't a God?
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What is a Blik according to RM Hare?
A statement which is unverifiable and unfalsifiable such as '"God is love". They still have meaning because they shape the way people view the world and live their lives.
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Other cards in this set

Card 2

Front

What school of Philosophy did the Vienna Circle inaugurate?

Back

Logical Positivism

Card 3

Front

Logical positivism aimed to design a set of criteria to determine whether a statement was what?

Back

Preview of the front of card 3

Card 4

Front

What influenced the Vienna Circle's Verification Principle?

Back

Preview of the front of card 4

Card 5

Front

What did Wittgenstein believe gave a statement meaning?

Back

Preview of the front of card 5
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