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logical positivism


n.

A philosophy asserting the primacy of observation in assessing the truth of statements of fact and holding that metaphysical and subjective arguments not based on observable data are meaningless. Also called logical empiricism.


 
 

Early school of analytic philosophy, inspired by David Hume, the mathematical logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1921). The school, formally instituted at the University of Vienna in a seminar of Moritz Schlick (1882 – 1936) in 1922, continued there as the Vienna Circle until 1938. It proposed several revolutionary theses: (1) All meaningful discourse consists either of (a) the formal sentences of logic and mathematics or (b) the factual propositions of the special sciences; (2) Any assertion that claims to be factual has meaning only if it is possible to say how it might be verified; (3) Metaphysical assertions, including the pronouncements of religion, belong to neither of the two classes of (1) and are therefore meaningless. Some logical positivists, notably A.J. Ayer, held that assertions in ethics (e.g., "It is wrong to steal") do not function logically as statements of fact but only as expressions of the speaker's feelings of approval or disapproval toward some action. See also Rudolf Carnap; emotivism; verifiability principle.

For more information on logical positivism, visit Britannica.com.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: logical positivism

Also known as logical empiricism and scientific empiricism; the ideas and attitude towards philosophy associated with the Vienna circle. This group was founded by Schlick and the mathematician Hans Hahn before the First World War, but entered its most famous period after being reconstituted in 1924. In effect the circle ended with Schlick's death in 1936 and the dispersal of Austrian intellectuals at that time. Its members included Gustav Bergman, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl (1902-88), Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann. Wittgenstein was not a full member of the circle, although closely in touch with its work, maintaining regular meetings with it from 1927 to 1929, and thereafter remaining in contact with Schlick and Waismann. The central interest of the Vienna circle was the unity of science and the correct delineation of scientific method. The idea was that this would act as a final solvent of the disputes of metaphysicians. The task of constructive philosophy became that of analysing the structure of scientific theory and language. The movement can be seen as a development of older empiricist and sensationalist doctrines in the light first of a better understanding of the methodology of empirical science, and secondly of the dramatically increased power of formal logic to permit the definition of abstractions and to describe the structures of permissible inferences. The combination is to some extent foreshadowed in Russell, whose logic and whose concept of a logical construction played a significant role in the doctrines of the movement. The most characteristic doctrine of logical positivism was the verification principle, or denial of literal or cognitive meaning to any statement that is not verifiable: ‘the meaning of a statement is its method of verification.’ The movement gained publicity in the English-speaking world when Ayer published Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936, and maintained some impetus, especially in the philosophy of science, after Carnap and Feigl emigrated to the United States. From 1930 onwards it took over the journal Erkenntnis as the journal of unified science.

Logical positivism retreated under a combination of pressures. First, it shared the traditional problems of radical empiricism, of satisfactorily describing the basis of knowledge in experience (see protocol statements). Secondly, it depended on there being one logic for science, or in other words a confirmation theory with a unique authority, yet no such structure, and certainly no basis for its authority, ever forthcame. These two problems bedevilled accurate formulation of the verification principle, and gradually persuaded philosophers of science that a more holistic and less formal relationship existed between theoretical sentences and the observations supporting them. When this relationship was allowed to be indirect, the despised theses of metaphysics began to look capable of climbing back into respectability. Finally, although logical positivism allowed that science contains statements thought of as logically necessary, its own account of the status of these claims (conventionalism) proved widely unacceptable, and the status of its claims about the basis of meaning in sensation appeared correspondingly doubtful. However, its influence persists in the widespread mistrust of statements for which there are no criteria or assertibility conditions: Wittgenstein's slogan that meaning is use has frequently been adopted as a rather less forthright invitation to work within the constraints of the principle of verification.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: logical positivism,
also known as logical or scientific empiricism, modern school of philosophy that attempted to introduce the methodology and precision of mathematics and the natural sciences into the field of philosophy. The movement, which began in the early 20th cent., was the fountainhead of the modern trend that considers philosophy an analytical, rather than a speculative, inquiry. It began in the group called the Vienna Circle, which formed around Moritz Schlick when he occupied (1920s) a chair of philosophy at the Univ. of Vienna. Among its members were the philosophers Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Victor Kraft, and the mathematicians Hans Hahn, Carl Menger, and Kurt Gödel. The movement soon had a widespread following in Europe and the United States. Among those philosophers whose work was influenced by the Vienna Circle are A. J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle. The position of the original logical positivists was a blend of the positivism of Ernst Mach with the logical concepts of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, but their inspiration was derived from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived for a time near Vienna, and G. E. Moore. The Vienna Circle in general subscribed to Wittgenstein's dictum in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that the object of philosophy was the logical clarification of thought; philosophy was not a theory but an activity. The logical positivists made a concerted effort to clarify the language of science by showing that the content of scientific theories could be reduced to truths of logic and mathematics coupled with propositions referring to sense experience. They held that metaphysical speculation was nonsensical, propositions of logic and mathematics tautological, and moral or value statements merely emotive. They championed the highly influential verification principle, from which it follows that a proposition has meaning only if some sense experience would suffice to determine its truth. The Vienna Circle disintegrated after the Nazis took control of Austria in the late 1930s. The influence of the movement, as a movement, ended c.1940. However, the concepts of the movement, particularly in its emphasis on the function of philosophy as the analysis of language, has been carried on throughout the West.

Bibliography

See A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (1959, repr. 1966); E. Gellner, Words and Things (rev. ed. 1968, repr. 1979).


 
Wikipedia: logical positivism

Logical positivism grew from the discussions of Moritz Schlick's Vienna Circle and Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement is known for its espousal of verificationism, its admiration for science and technical rigor, and its commitment to the analytic-synthetic distinction. The logical positivists agreed that there are no synthetic a priori propositions, though they disagreed with earlier positivists, such as Ernst Mach, who held that the a priori had no place in science.

Origins

The chief influences on the early logical positivists were the positivist Ernst Mach and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Mach's influence is most apparent in the logical positivists' persistent concern with metaphysics, the unity of science, and the interpretation of the theoretical terms of science, as well as the doctrines of reductionism and phenomenalism, later abandoned by many positivists.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus was a text of great importance for the positivists. The use of the tools of modern logic for linguistic reform, the conception of philosophy as a "critique of language," and the possibility of drawing a theoretically principled distinction between intelligible and nonsensical discourse were all appealing to the logical positivists. Many positivists adopted a correspondence theory of truth similar to that of the Tractatus, although some, like Otto Neurath, preferred a form of coherentism. Wittgenstein's influence is further evident in certain formulations of the verification principle. Compare, for example, Proposition 4.024 of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein asserts that we understand a proposition when we know what happens if it is true, with Schlick's assertion that "To state the circumstances under which a proposition is true is the same as stating its meaning".[1] The tractarian doctrine that the truths of logic are tautologies was widely held among the logical positivists. Wittgenstein also influenced the logical positivists' interpretation of probability. According to Neurath, not all the logical positivists liked the Tractatus; it was full of metaphysics.[2]

Contemporary developments in logic and the foundations of mathematics, especially Russell and Whitehead's monumental Principia Mathematica, impressed the more mathematically minded logical positivists such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap. "Language-planning" and syntactical techniques derived from these developments were used to defend logicism in the philosophy of mathematics and various reductionist theses. Russell's theory of types was employed to explosive effect in Carnap's early anti-metaphysical polemics.[3]

Immanuel Kant was something of a punching bag in many of the logical positivists' early debates, but his influence shows through. His doctrine of synthetic a priori truths was the view to overthrow, and his notion of the thing in itself commanded its fair share of attention. More positively, Kantian views about the nature of physical objects pervade the "protocol sentence" debate[4], and the positivists all shared somewhat Kantian views about the relationship between philosophy and science.[5]

Basic tenets

Although the logical positivists held a wide range of beliefs on many matters, they were all interested in science and skeptical of theology and metaphysics. Early on, most logical positivists believed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Many logical positivists supported forms of materialism, philosophical naturalism, and empiricism.

Perhaps the view for which the logical positivists are best known is the verifiability criterion of meaning, or verificationism. In one of its earlier and stronger formulations, this is the doctrine that a proposition is "cognitively meaningful" only if there is a finite procedure for conclusively determining whether it is true or false.[6] An intended consequence of this view, for most logical positivists, is that metaphysical, theological, and ethical statements fall short of this criterion, and so are not cognitively meaningful.[7] They distinguished cognitive from other varieties of meaningfulness (e.g. emotive, expressive, figurative), and most authors concede that the non-cognitive statements of the history of philosophy possess some other kind of meaningfulness. The positive characterization of cognitive meaningfulness varies from author to author. It has been described as the property of having a truth value, corresponding to a possible state of affairs, naming a proposition, or being intelligible or understandable in the sense in which scientific statements are intelligible or understandable.[8]

Another characteristic feature of logical positivism is the commitment to "Unified Science"; that is, the development of a common language or, in Neurath's phrase, a "universal slang" in which all scientific propositions can be expressed.[9] The adequacy of proposals or fragments of proposals for such a language was often asserted on the basis of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one special science to the terms of another, putatively more fundamental one. Sometimes these reductions took the form of set-theoretic manipulations of a handful of logically primitive concepts;[10] sometimes these reductions took the form of allegedly analytic or a priori deductive relationships.[11]. A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept.

Criticism and influences

Early critics of logical positivism said that its fundamental tenets could not themselves be formulated in a way that was clearly consistent. The verifiability criterion of meaning did not seem verifiable; but neither was it simply a logical tautology, since it had implications for the practice of science and the empirical truth of other statements. This presented severe problems for the logical consistency of the theory. [citation needed] Another problem was that, while positive existential claims ("there is at least one human being") and negative universals ("not all ravens are black") allow for clear methods of verification (find a human or a non-black raven), negative existential claims and positive universal claims do not allow for verification.

Universal claims could apparently never be verified: How can you tell that all ravens are black, unless you've hunted down every raven ever, including those in the past and future? This led to a great deal of work on induction, probability, and "confirmation", which combined verification and falsification.

Karl Popper, a well-known critic of logical positivism, published the book Logik der Forschung in 1934 (translated by himself as The Logic of Scientific Discovery published 1959). In it he presented an influential alternative to the verifiability criterion of meaning, defining scientific statements in terms of falsifiability. First, though, Popper's concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from meaningless statements, but distinguishing "scientific" from "metaphysical" statements. He did not hold that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; neither did he hold that a statement that in one century was "metaphysical" while unfalsifiable (like the ancient Greek philosophy about atoms), could not in another century become "falsifiable" and thus "scientific". About psychoanalysis he thought something similar: in his day it offered no method for falsification, and thus was not falsifiable and not scientific. However, he did not exclude it being meaningful, nor did he say psychoanalysts were necessarily "wrong" (it only couldn't be proven either way: that would have meant it was falsifiable), nor did he exclude that one day psychoanalysis could evolve into something falsifiable, and thus "scientific". He was, in general, more concerned with scientific practice than with the logical issues that troubled the positivists. Second, although Popper's philosophy of science enjoyed great popularity for some years, if his criterion is construed as an answer to the question the positivists were asking, it turns out to fail in exactly parallel ways. Negative existential claims ("there are no unicorns") and positive universals ("all ravens are black") can be falsified, but positive existential and negative universal claims cannot, although Popper thought himself these could be deemed as verifiable[12].

Logical positivists' response to the first criticism is that logical positivism is a philosophy of science, not an axiomatic system that can prove its own consistency (see Gödel's incompleteness theorem). Secondly, a theory of language and mathematical logic were created to answer what it really means to make statements like "all ravens are black".

A response to the second criticism was provided by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, in which he sets out the distinction between "strong" and "weak" verification. "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience." (Ayer 1946:50) It is this sense of verifiable that causes the problem of verification with negative existential claims and positive universal claims. However, the weak sense of verification states that a proposition is "verifiable... if it is possible for experience to render it probable" (ibid.). After establishing this distinction, Ayer goes on to claim that "no proposition, other than a tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis" (Ayer 1946:51), and therefore can only be subject to weak verification. This defense was controversial among logical positivists, some of whom stuck to strong verification, and claimed that general propositions were indeed nonsense.

Subsequent philosophy of science tends to make use of certain aspects of both of these approaches. W. V. O. Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements and the reduction of meaningful statements to immediate experience. Work by Thomas Kuhn has convinced many that it is not possible to provide truth conditions for science independent of its historical paradigm. But even this criticism was not unknown to the logical positivists: Otto Neurath compared science to a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea.

Logical positivism was essential to the development of early analytic philosophy. It was disseminated throughout the European continent and, later, in American universities by the members of the Vienna Circle. A.J. Ayer is considered responsible for the spread of logical positivism to Britain. The term subsequently came to be almost interchangeable with "analytic philosophy" in the first half of the twentieth century. Logical positivism was immensely influential in the philosophy of language and represented the dominant philosophy of science between World War I and the Cold War. Many subsequent commentators on "logical positivism" have attributed to its proponents a greater unity of purpose and creed than they actually shared, overlooking the complex disagreements among the logical positivists themselves.

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Positivismus und Realismus", Erkenntnis 3:1-31, English trans. in Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) Logical Empiricism at its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. New York: Garland Pub., 1996, p. 38
  2. ^ For a very informative and somewhat cute summary of the effect the Tractatus had on the leading logical positivists, see the Entwicklung der Thesen des "Wiener Kreises"
  3. ^ See Carnap, Rudolf. "The Elimination Of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language." Erkenntnis 2 (1932). Rpt. in Logical Positivism. Ed. Alfred Jules Ayer. New York: Free Press, 1959. 60-81.
  4. ^ See the essays by Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath in Ayer's Logical Positivism.
  5. ^ Friedman, Michael, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  6. ^ For a classic survey of other versions of verificationism, see Hempel, Carl. "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." Revue Internationale de Philosophie 41 (1950), pp 41-63.
  7. ^ For the classic expression of this view, see Carnap, op. cit. Moritz Schlick, a key figure in the logical positivist movement, did not believe ethical (or aesthetic) sentences to be cognitively meaningless. See Schlick, Moritz. "The Future Of Philosophy." The Linguistic Turn. Ed. Richard Rorty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 43-53.
  8. ^ Examples of these different views can be found in Scheffler's Anatomy of Inquiry, Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, Schlick's "Positivism and Realism" (rpt. in Sarkar (1996) and Ayer (1959)), and Carnap's Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
  9. ^ For a thorough consideration of what the thesis of the unity of science amounts to, see Frost-Arnold, Gregory, "The Large-Scale Structure of Logical Empiricism: Unity of Science and the Rejection of Metaphysics" at [1]
  10. ^ As in Carnap's (1928) Logical Structure of the World.
  11. ^ As in Carnap's Testability and Meaning
  12. ^ Popper, K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, chapter 13

Further reading

  • Achinstein, Peter and Barker, Stephen F. The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
  • Ayer, Alfred Jules. Logical Positivism. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959.
  • Barone, Francesco. Il neopositivismo logico. Roma Bari: Laterza, 1986.
  • Bergmann, Gustav. The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. New York: Longmans Green, 1954.
  • Cirera, Ramon. Carnap and the Vienna Circle: Empiricism and Logical Syntax. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994.
  • Edmonds, David & Eidinow, John; Wittgenstein's Poker, ISBN 0-06-621244-8
  • Friedman, Michael. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999
  • Gadol, Eugene T. Rationality and Science: A Memorial Volume for Moritz Schlick in Celebration of the Centennial of his Birth. Wien: Springer, 1982.
  • Geymonat, Ludovico. La nuova filosofia della natura in Germania. Torino, 1934.
  • Giere, Ronald N. and Richardson, Alan W. Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
  • Hanfling, Oswald. Logical Positivism. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981.
  • Jangam, R. T. Logical Positivism and Politics. Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1970.
  • Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen. Wittgenstein's Vienna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
  • Kraft, Victor. The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-positivism, a Chapter in the History of Recent Philosophy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1953.
  • McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Trans. by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979.
  • Mises von, Richard. Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.
  • Parrini, Paolo. Empirismo logico e convenzionalismo: saggio di storia della filosofia della scienza. Milano: F. Angeli, 1983.
  • Parrini, Paolo; Salmon, Wesley C.; Salmon, Merrilee H. (ed.) Logical Empiricism - Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
  • Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science : To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Rescher, Nicholas. The Heritage of Logical Positivism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.
  • Salmon, Wesley and Wolters, Gereon (ed.), Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21-24 May 1991, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra. The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: From 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra. Logical Empiricism at its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra. Logical Empiricism and the Special Sciences: Reichenbach, Feigl, and Nagel. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra. Decline and Obsolescence of Logical Empiricism: Carnap vs. Quine and the Critics. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra. The Legacy of the Vienna Circle: Modern Reappraisals. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
  • Spohn, Wolfgang (ed.), Erkenntnis Orientated: A Centennial Volume for Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
  • Werkmeister, William (May, 1937). "Seven Theses of Logical Positivism Critically Examined". The Philosophical Review 46 (3): 276-297. Cornell University. 

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