ouhohoohh wait. sorry gender moment. changing my pronouns but it's like a werewolf transformation scene where their clothes stretch and rip and tear as i become the evil transtrender i once feared. adding it/its to my bio lol

Critical rationalism or logical positivism?

Critical rationalism for sure! Any attempt at inductive reasoning is fraught with too many conflating variables which absolutely destroy any claim that the logic used in an inductive reasoning scenario can be both valid and sound. In addition to this, if there is one thing that humanity has proved to itself time and time again (in my eyes, anyways), it’s that there really is no way to truly prove what reality is. How many times have people argued with another in any role and thought to themselves, “Oh my god, they are detached from reality!”? The answer: innumerable times. What’s unfortunate about each and every one of these times is that the person with that thought has committed several logical and interpersonal sins; one, they assumed that their perception of the world outside of their self consciousness was the hard and fast truth; two, they assumed that there is a whole consensus on what the shared space we call “reality” is; three, they have invalidated the being of the other’s self consciousness (and therefore by extension questioned the validity of that person’s entire existence - dehumanizing at best, wholly monstrous solipsism at worst); etc. I know I myself am not free of guilt in this example. I believe thinking in these lines is endemic and inherent to members of a society and a society’s superstructures in a society that has been shaped by a legacy of logical positivism. I also think that logical positivism is one of the many load bearing frameworks which serve as the foundation for what we call “Western society”; that is, a white supremacist society founded on colonialism (for these purposes, another iteration of imperialism, which was of course the enabler of an establishment of Western hegmony centuries ago), liberalism, and capitalism, and which survives today on a globalized neocolonialism, unfettered capitalism, and neoliberalism in social and economic spheres. Given what is generally accepted to be known about the history of Western civilization (that it is white supremacist, that it prefers concentration of power and capital in small groups (seen again and again in economic boom/bust cycles), and that it does so primarily by constructing identities and manufacturing consent based on “empirical proof”), I would say that perhaps there is something fundamentally toxic in the ideas of logical positivism when it is applied outside of an individual predicting their own behaviors and reactions in future scenarios or evaluating their behaviors or reactions in an unfolding interaction. Of course, there are problems with critical rationalism as well, but if I had to pick an epistemic framework from the two, I’d pick critical rationalism, as it produces an environmental which is more hospitable to revolutionary thought and change, rather than logical positivism, which would almost always condone revisionism and reformism as likely successful avenues for societal change despite the lack of evidence showing this phenomenon to have already been true.

Thanks so much for this ask! I had a fucking lot of fun answering it. Honestly, epistemology is my weakest area in philosophy, and I’ve only recently started to really dive into it with any real gusto (and I’ve been studying philosophy for eleven years now!). I’ve always found much of the discourse to be kind of moot, but this current zeitgeist has shown me the value in it over the last year. Also, this ask reminds me a lot of a video I saw recently on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Philosophy Tube, which discussed why people in today’s day and age become Flat Earthers. You can watch it here, and I highly recommend anyone who actually bothered to read my answer here and/or found this interesting to watch it! Olly, the guy who runs the channel, has a master’s in philosophy from Oxford. He really knows his shit and makes hard concepts interesting, easy to digest, relevant, and fun.