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