Were the positivists working out testability criteria in contrast or with reference to an alternative approach to science and nature?
A. Well the positivists initially had a flirtation with naturalism, but in the end, they believed that it, too, was kind of metaphysical. So they took a very agnostic stance on this. In fact, they thought, well, look, given the developments that were taking place in physics, which were creating rather weird conceptions of reality which really hadn’t been worked out, they weren’t like the kinds of conceptions of reality associated with traditional naturalism. If we think about naturalism as Aristotle or Newton, the way objects move causally in some sort of an observable space, these things of things. These very fundamental assumptions, which are associated with naturalism historically, were being challenged by science. So one couldn’t really assume even that bare metaphysics in the sense that one would even have to strip that off if one wanted to be able to test scientific theories appropriately. So this is the whole idea of getting rid of the metaphysics.
