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20 THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL WORKSTHE CRITIQUE OF POSITIVISMAs Popper recalls in his autobiography (UQ: 80), he saw his first workas a ‘critical discussion’ of the doctrines of the Vienna Circle, withspecial regard to the solutions offered by Wittgenstein, Schlick andCarnap. These philosophers were, in fact, Popper’s constantinterlocutors, and they remained so even after he had had theopportunity to go more deeply into disputed areas of contemporaryphysics and to consider also the social and other less exact sciences.Although Popper recognizes that logical positivism has ‘the merit ofbeing the only modern theory of knowledge to have fought for strictempiricism’ (BG: 321), he cannot help opposing its ‘thesis of theomnipotence of science’ (BG: 315), which founders on inductivistprejudices and a specifically epistemological contradiction. For ‘thepositivist interpretation of scientific knowledge is in contradiction withthe actual procedures of the empirical sciences, with the methods ofscientific justification’ (BG: 48). It is curious to note that the very sameaccusation would later be turned against Popper by Kuhn, Feyerabendand other advocates of the ‘new philosophy of science’; in their view,his critical rationalism developed an ideal ‘armchair’ method, as itwere, without taking into account the history of science and the actualpractice of working scientists.For the young Popper, on the other hand, not only did logicalpositivism fail to do justice to real scientific practice, it urged anunacceptable dogma to the effect that ‘what we cannot know withcertainty does not exist’ (BG: 315). In other words, Popper thought ithis task to refute the identification of thought (or rather, language) withbeing, on the grounds that being—and here we glimpse the realistcommitment that would later be openly declared —always extendsbeyond thought. These were not initially the dominant aspects,however; what we find surviving in the Logic from the broad criticalsurvey in the Two Problems are mainly the more technical elements,particularly the rejection of the verification principle as a criterion ofmeaning. According to this principle, as is well known, a non-analyticstatement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. Popperwould not accept this as a criterion of meaning because, as he said in alecture from 1953, he always regarded the problem of meaning as apseudo-problem and never felt any interest in it. On the other hand, ifthe verification principle is taken as a criterion not of meaning but ofdemarcation between what is and what is not science, then the ‘criterionis too narrow (and too wide): it excludes from science practically