ad. 1. The manifesto was mainly about "unified science", the view that science really is a big body and every science can be related to each other. For example psychology to biology to chemistry to physics. The discussion of psychology is rather minor. I found some text that attributes a strong form of behaviorism to the early Carnap and his student Gustav Hempel, who joined some of the discussions of the Vienna circle. There are only Hempel quotes in it though: www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/behavior.htm#Logical%20Behaviorism:%20Rudolf%20Carnap ad 2. The syntactican uses an empirical test to get knowledge about syntax by asking native speakers wether certain written (visual data) or spoken (auditory data) sentence seem to be right. The response is empirically observable. So competence is a empirical thing. Performance of course is observable too. That competence comes before performance is a theory that too has directly observable consequences. For example we can see that distractions like alcohol, stress etc. increases the difference between competence and performance. In written texts we can see that people change wrong performance to correct one by eliminating mistakes. So we have empirical definitions of competence, performance and a empirically testable theory of how the two are interrelated. I don´t think anything essential is left out in my positivtst analysis of the terms. On the topic of stupidity/ignorance: If stupidity is not knowing what you are ignorant of, than stupidity is just second order ignorance. I don´t see a problem with higher orders either. And I think learning can sometimes remove both kinds of ignorance. For example I can be ignorant of the fact that the bad reception of a speech I give isn´t because the content is bad, but because I haven´t considered the importance of presentation skills, even if I don´t know these skills. So I can first learn that I´m ignorant about the importance of presentation skills and then what these skills are specifically. I wouldn´t say that one ignorance is stupid and one not. I think the difference is rather what we associate with both words. Mike