A History of Philosophy | 76 Logical Positivism

scientism of people like Kant and mill wanting to universalize the use of scientific method for hypothetical deductive method at that kind of universal extension of the scientific mode of explanation was picked up again by Bertrand Russell developed with considerable more technicality with his logical atom ISM which you will have noticed seemed to presuppose an atomistic metaphysic as well we'll see that comes into play in the discussion today and then picked up again with vidcon stein in his Tractatus along very similar lies now logical positivism continues that 19th century positivist emphasis in the 19th century that was the term coined by Copts a phase third positive stage where were dealing with objective empirical data of a scientific sort and seeking to formulate empirical generalizations with explanatory power so continuing then that positivist emphasis on objective empirical data continuing the positivist unity of science Aseema but the logical and the logical adjective logical positivism to stress the influence of Russell's emphasis on the logical use logical form of the language so twentieth-century logical positivism has its roots and in people like Comte mill and mark there was a that's better now there was a vienna circle of logical positivists which developed in the nineteen tens of the 1920s which shaped the continental development of this movement the english development was sort of a spinoff from the vienna circle but then was popularized by aja a' in his language truth and logic within the vienna circle you have people like moritz schlick and rudolf carnap those names you'll find referred to in the literature and the main significance of the vienna circle in which incidentally Vidkun Stein participated after he had dropped out from Oxford and gone back to Austria but the significance of the vienna circle is in their initial development of the movement from a rather naive kind of empiricism into one which recognized that if we distinguish between sense data and material objects we tend towards a phenomena list epistemology and one which recognized that we cannot always have direct impure verification of an apparently empirical statement sometimes it has to be in time rate and through the logical implications of that statement in conjunction with other assertions but the vienna circle laid the foundation now both the in the vienna circle and in aja are the basis of crucial basis the thing which gave it its distinctive impact and the demise of which led to the demise of logical positivism the distinction was its verifiability theory of meaning now let me stress that it's not a theory of how you ascertain truth it's not a theory of truth even though the word verifiability is used it has to do with the meaning of language it's a theory about language and you can get what the theory is rather simply if you look at this diagram where language has basically two uses cognitive and non-cognitive there are all sorts of non-cognitive utterances emotional exclamations questions cries expressive statements and on the other hand the cognitive statements yes the cognitive make statements statements of two sorts synthetic an anorak which sounds like a reversion to david hume synthetic statements being factual matters of fact which one would expect to be amenable to empirical verifiability and analytics statements in which the predicate is logically contained within the subject have simply formal meaning in the sense they are simply talking about the logical use of the subject and rendered of the latter sort you have definitions you have tautologies and depending on the logical positivists you likely have mathematical statements but basically any statement which has the logical form of the laws of thought a equals a a is not non so a definition is included a tautology is included and if it is maintained that mathematical statements are analytic rather than empirical as millard thought then they are included as well now the verifiability theory is a theory about the meaning of factual statements that's where it focuses and the theory is stated for instance by stones when he says that the meaning of a factual statement is the method of its verification the meaning is the method of its verification now that's perhaps not very illuminating except that it does emphasize the importance of empirical procedures empirical verification procedures more specifically the meaning of an empirical statement is in its reference in its sense its reference to empirical data whether those actually available or possible empirical data so the method of varrock a verification is important because you must know how data in order to be able to say what sort of data a statement would refer to and so the method of error tation is essential to ascertaining the meaningfulness of a factual statement now the distinctions beyond that begin to appear the so that if you read the preface to this second edition mine's more doggy and above yours but if you read the preface to this second edition you'll find that err distinguishes between direct and indirect verification so that the statement I see a house cook is directly verifiable and because it's directly verifiable it has factual mean doesn't matter whether it's true or false its meaning is such that you could if you wish to but that's left for scientists you could ascertain the truth of the false if you know the method of verification the philosophers concern is simply to ascertain whether it is a factually meaningful statement and for that all you need to know is that there is a method of possible verification on the other hand in direct verification requires other premises which would entail directly verifiable statements that are not deducible from a given statement alone take for instance a statement like this key is made of iron this tea is made of iron now that I am seeing a key would be directly verifiable but that this key is made of iron wood for verification purposes require methods of taining what the metal is and so in conjunction with such further premises then certain possible observations might be to do some of which could verify indirectly that this key is made of iron so direct or indirect verification and Carnot made a lot of late a lot of emphasis on the importance of indirect verification in the sciences that's one distinction in his first chapter a ax also distinguishes between in practice now it's verifiable in practice that I see a roomful of faces in front of me but it's only verifiable in principle that mushrooms grow on the other side of the moon or that Cleopatra wore a red gown on her 21st birthday that is to say if we were able to go to the other side of the Moon we would know what observation procedures to use and if we could go back in a time machine to Cleopatra's times and check up on her on her 21st birthday then we would be able to verify that she wore a red gown on her 21st birthday that statement is then verifiable in principle so use so you see the verifiability principle makes it possible to admit historical statements a statements about the future statements about what is technically it technologically impossible in practice not possible but in principle but what it disallows is the kind of statement that is not at all available to empirical verification namely metaphysical statements of a reality in itself that is distinct from all appearances and I say a reality in itself because when you read a is first chapter on the elimination of metaphysics you begin to see that the kind of metaphysics he's eliminating is the FH Bradley kind where Bradley the Hegelian distinguish between reality and it's varying degrees of appearance the reality in itself is not empirically accessible talk about it is not empirically verifiable data that meant a physical assertion that would be eliminated but the various appearances they are of course apparently accessible and so there's no problem in talking about appearances but the metaphysics that is eliminated is the one which makes a distinction between the thing in itself and the thing for me the underlying reality and the world of appearances okay now there is a third distinction which he makes in the first chapter page 37 the distinction between strong and weak verification strong and weak verification strong verification would be conclusive it would provide you with certainty the sort of thing which the foundationalist would what weak verification would be satisfied with probability now air is perfectly happy then to define a verifiability principle which admits in direct verification verification in principle rather than necessarily in practice and week rather than strong their ratification okay keep that in mind it's pretty important now let me make some comments about the kinds of response that this verifiability principal met with because within a couple of decades it was having to be reformulated under criticism indeed some of these distinctions which a are introduces were distinctions introduced in response to criticism criticism of too narrow an empirical criterion and eventually it was the criticism of this verifiability principle which led to the demise of logical positivism now one of the first criticisms was that empirical generalizations not verifiable even in principle empirical generalizations are not verifiable even in principle that is to say with the generalization there are always more possible cases that are inaccessible so that any statement about all members of an extensive class would buy the verifiability principle be without factual meaning and the response to that was to claim that all right what we need is a falsifiability principle that is to say an empirical generalization is always falsifiable in principle if you could find one negative instance you falsified the generalization ok all Cretans are liars now find a native who's not and you're falsifying to the general statement what this then means is that you simply want a proposition a purportedly factual statement to be amenable to either verifier verification practices or falsification practices verifiability or somesuch for it to have empirical reference you might say why not insist simply on falsifiability when you see the thing is that while an empirical generalization is not verifiable that is falsifiable a singular assertion about a particular case is verifiable but it's not always falsified you see there exists a so-and-so who it's not always falsifiable how do you know that there does not exist someone of that description who's hiding every time you know like yes and so you need both the verifiability and the falsified the second line of criticism was to do with the status of the verifiability criterion itself the positivist tells us that all statements are either synthetic or analytic factual or formal which is the statement of the verifiability visible is the verifiability principle a factual statement that is indeed a meaning of meaning or is it a formal statement analytic well it becomes very evident that the verifiability theory is not an empirical statement that is amenable to verification or falsification by empirical procedures I had a professor in graduate school Fifty's who to make the point said people have been something else by meaning all the way through history that is to say if this were an empirical description of factual meaning that the only factual meaning is with reference to empirical objects to empirical data then it would be impossible for people to find things meaningful which refer to other kinds of entities as of course they do Plato found it very meaningful to talk of real forms theologians find it very meaningful to talk of God and neither of these are empirically accessible to verification purposes yes so it is plainly either a factually false statement or it is not a factual statement no AI got the pot and he backs up from claiming that it is a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and contends instead that it is a methodological stipulation in other words it's a rule one that the positivist adopts for methodological purposes well if that's the case and you don't want to adopt it you don't have to and consequently the verifiability principle loses its hold on philosophical discourse you see if you want to be an empiricist if you want to be a positivist then this is a good principle to work but if you don't want to be a positivist then obviously there's no necessity incumbent on you that you adopt it and the whole tempest began to subside it's hardly a definition it's much more and principle just because it is supposedly common to the empirical sciences does not mean that it's applicable to all factual statements but that led to a third line of criticism you see the verifiability principle was developed on the assumption that it was the operative principle in the empirical sciences but we began to get developments in philosophy of science which made it plain that the sciences are not purely empirical and so that is not even the principle that's applicable to the empirical sciences there you can anticipate what those developments were they were the developments that began to recognize subjectivity in Natural Science developments that began to feel the influence of cars a priori Grimm's the component revolution in the Natural Sciences developments that began to reject the over simplicity of the hypothetical deductive method and let me mention three or four of these world was the work of a man named Noir word Henson a book of his called patterns of discovery Henson taught at Yale history philosophy of science and his historical research led him to the conclusion that all observations are theory leader and you don't have to have a very sophisticated appreciation of scientific method in order to see that the scientist doesn't just stand around gawking at all possible data the scientist comes with a working hypothesis so that his relevant data their relevance is to find what the working hypothesis which in turn is suggested by a theory in other words there are antecedent conceptual factors which determine what data you take into account theory Laden observations second example is one you're probably more familiar with Thomas Kuhn his work on the structure of scientific revolutions published in the nineteen fifties in which he on the basis of gain of his history of science studies began to recognize that the Aryans a part of a much larger conceptual paradigm and that scientific revolutions occur when there are paradigm shifts changes of Ptolemy cosmology to a Copernican cosmology was a paradigm shift tell his point is that you may get a periods of progressive increase of scientific knowledge cumulatively within paradigms and granted the paradigms than may therefore seem to be the empirical verifiability of certain theories that work though those suggested by the paradigm but when you get a paradigm shift a different framework of explanation is involved and the paradigm shift does not occur because of the weight of empirical evidence it occurs because within the scientific community there develops often for non empirical reasons dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm it may lack explanatory power it may lack coherence it may prove to be needlessly complicated and we opted for a more simplistic one and so forth and so the the hold of a pure objective empiricism on science is rejected by Thomas Kuhn third example is Michael Polanyi a Polish philosopher of science who was teaching in Britain and Michael Polanyi he developed his work in two major books one called the tacit dimension and the other personal knowledge no in both cases the titles are sort of revealing the tacit dimension makes plain that there are a variety of of tacit aspects of human knowledge that are not explicate it by empirical research in everyday perception we have peripheral vision which you don't particularly think of until somebody says something about it that draws at the amount so that as I look over here I become aware peripherally that David is still over here yes now this always that sort of peripheral awareness not only visually but mentally part of the larger context of the de staat which we observe so that the focused objective empirical study is only telling you part of the story and in his work on personal knowledge he's talking about the personal dimension in knowledge that affects motivation choice of a research tonic selectivity sometime if you want to sort of test for yourself the view that science is always purely objective and deep personal ask a scientist why he is involved in science I did that once with a chemist friend and why chemistry and why the kind of research interest you have in chemistry and all the while you get either aesthetic judgments or other value judgments in response to the question that is to say there is constantly the personal dimension involved that is why progress in science is unpredictable because we never know what the personal dimension may be or for that matter the socio-economic dimension the drive certain scientific message so keep in mind Pawlenty and then more recently we have fire a burned who adopts a conventionalist interpretation of science that is to say scientific theories simply conventional ways that scientists have of talking about things a conventional ISM that is entirely relativistic the science does not tell us about reality this is anti realism in science now with those developments which began in the 40s and went on into the 60s what you begin to get then is the rejection of the view that all scientific explanation is purely objective empirical explanation in terms of general covering laws and miracle generalizations that scientific knowledge is always empirically verified or at least verifiable in principle that just doesn't seem to be the case and so the whole thesis of Zionism begins to collapse this is post-modernism in philosophy of science now there's a fourth objection which you will read about it's tough when he introduces new you may have read it already I'll help you have two WVO Quine the Harvard philosopher whose famous essay on the two dogmas of empiricism was a landmark in the demise of logical positivism the two dogmas of empiricism one of the dogmas is reductionism reductionism the attempt to reduce all knowledge to empirical generalization the verifiability principle is reductionist in that sense it's trying to reduce all factual statements to empirically verifiable seems reductionism and he rejects that because of his view that observations of theory laitanan a not purely objective and theory neutral the second dogma of empiricism is what he calls the analytic synthetic dichotomy and plainly of a verifiability principle hinges on the view but some statements are synthetic other statements are analytic and Ania between delete these are separate categories a dichotomy two different kinds logically propositions and what coin does is to argue that that dichotomy breaks down that it's a matter of degree depending on the context there so that for instance if you take and this is not his example if you state take the statement God is good okay that statement may appear to be the service a factual statement which the positivist would like to have empirically accessible because it's not a Oh would rule it out it's not really a factual statement but within the context of judeo-christian discourse is it intended to be an empirical statement of a factual sort isn't it rather an analytic statement from a theological standpoint the very meaning of the term God not only in the judeo-christian tradition but in the Platonic tradition is that God is the gut so to say God is good in that context is an analytic statement now which is it well it can function both ways in different contexts if you're dealing with a pure empiricist thinks the word God comes devoid of any such meaning it may look like a neutral factual statement but if the word God has any meaning at all in any major religion it's in terms of God is good and so what Quine does is to recognize this sort of thing in a whole variety of cases and reject the dichotomy rather he sees human knowledge not as a collection of isolable propositions which we interconnect with in a deductive system Bertrand Russell's style not that knowledge is not the model mall to be modeled on a deductive system knowledge is rather more of a web of beliefs now the difference is of course that a deductive system moves with pretty well military precision from one proposition to another proposition to another proposition all the way to logical deduction whereas a web of belief would be web of mutually supportive propositions woven in various ways that are not strictly formulate a bull in deductive system it's a web of hypotheses interrelated which we construct that is to say that the body of knowledge which we have is characterized by coherence coherence in the sense that it is unified it hangs together coherence in the sense that it is self consistent and internally self-supporting but it is a fallibilist viewer in as much as because of the paradigmatic nature of thought we may be working with a somewhat mistaken paradigm so that the overall pattern of interrelationships may be somewhat different from what we think and in addition to the fallibilism and the coherence which provides some justification he offers a pragmatic justification for the web the lengths it works to think this work and there I think that his basis for the pragmatic justification comes out of the sciences that is to say a pattern of scientific hypothesis is adopted and viewed as probably correct because it is fertile fruitful it enabled you to propose further hypotheses to set up research programs to do research no buns the way to fill things so there is pragmatic that to such a thing well if they you reject the analytic synthetic dye connelly it becomes pretty apparent that the whole positivist scheme is beginning to crumble no the final criticism that I want to note came from vidcon Stein himself the Vidkun Stein and who in his earlier work the tritannus had essentially been a Russell type logical animist and apparently been verifiability type of person Vidkun Stein and in 1945 a published his second major work the philosophical investigations and so when we talk of the later Wittgenstein this is the work that were referred the philosophical investigations he criticizes the positivism of his previous work in various ways one is that the picture theory of meaning as he called it that is to say the verifiability theory is devoid of any clear meaning it sounds like the verifiability theory isn't meaningful it's the same criticism he recognizes it he however adds to it the complaint that the insistence on an ideal logical language you remember we distinguish between ideal and language philosophy and ordinary language philosophy the insistence on an ideal logical language of the salt that Russell had wanted where you have atomic propositions referring to atomic facts that is too artificial too artificial it is artificial because the language just doesn't fit into that sort of a narrow reductionist mold you see echoing the same criticism as crine language doesn't fit into that narrower mold in contrast when you look at ordinary language usage the way in which language is used by ordinary people even by scientists when they're not talking scientifically in scientific jargon we find that it is much more varied much more varied than simply either cognitive or non cognitive if cognitive either factual or formal much more very comment and ordinary language usage after all has developed over the centuries of trial and error existing it's tried and proven it's worth over the centuries so what he does is to talk instead of there being unknown top lissa T of language games ways of using language just as I illustrate it now crimes point with the phrase with a clause God is good which could apparently be taken as either a synthetic statement or an analytic statement so you might recognize that the statement god is good used in a certain pastoral context that is to say by a pastor trying to comfort a grieving widow the statement used in that context is serving another function than simply saying something factual objective scientific or on the other hand offering a definition or a tautology the language is intended to perform a function other I was going to say a social sort a pastoral sort you see a diversity of language games because there are tota there is a diversity of forms of life that's is to say games that we play in living what we do in life and the kind of analysis we want them is a functional analysis rather than a logical analysis an analysis not of the logic of language imposing a narrow positivist grids but an analysis of the actual functions that language serves in ordinary discourse you might say it's between Stein has been converted from a mathematician and scientist to a lover of the humanities because if he's been reading some literature while he's been away but the diversity of language games and it is this broadening of the horizon to other ways of using language than simply empirical or analytic which finally seems to have broken the camel's back there in English philosophy so that by the mid fifties I think it's fair to say ordinary language philosophy was the dominant thing in British universities via logical positivism had been fifteen years before now what had happened in between well these philosophical reactions but in addition World War two and I don't think it's without point that Western civilization couldn't go through the trauma of World War two without discovering how thin in terms of meaning the positivist analysis of language really is and consequently the broadening expectations now one of the further influences in that shift will come out as you read aja ax I have here a couple of pages from his autobiography in which he indicates this further influence now let me read a couple of paragraphs from this incidentally I was fascinated to read his autobiography a few years ago because it turned out that he had been during World War Two in British counterintelligence first of all in german-occupied France and later involved in breaking the German codes at a early computer style and an analytic a base in Bermuda the thing that fascinated me about that was that I was in Bermuda at the same time as a radio technician that the Air Force and we were sent over from Kenley field one day to Hamilton harder to an island on Hamilton in Hamilton Harvard a surface of equipment and were told that we go to make our headquarters but a hotel that the military had taken over and they sure and have our meals there which we did and curiously there were a lot of civilians there who we figured was simply civilians who had been taken from the military to work on this secret project where we was servicing all I know ajao was one of those because it was at that very time he was there so it was so I was fascinated to read his autobiography because we passed like ships in the night or like boats on Hamilton Harbor he says this about how the book was written I started at once to write the book and completed it in 18 months working on it almost continuously except for intervals of teaching they just can't imagine that I've written all my other books in longhand but this one I typed clumsily with two fingers and gives me courage but in the end producing a serviceable script except that the first chapter was adapted from an article in the journal mind I made no preliminary draft but wrote slowly to avoid the need for Corrections I'm satisfied and take heart from this people I was satisfied if a day's work yielded me one page of 300 words okay and I figure that if an eight-hour day I can produce ten pages I'm doing well he took the one page 300 words had I been able to achieve this everyday I should have finished the book in little more than half a year instead of a year and a half since it was only 60,000 words long some of you were asking yourselves about its length as I came in so many words for so smaller price had I been able to achieve this every day but I was frequently held up not so much by not knowing what I wanted to say sometimes this happened but by not being able to decide how effectively to st. I was writing with passion but also taking great pains to make my meaning clear well this labor was not wasted what are its D merits the book did not suffer from obscurity it could rather be accused of sacrificing depth declarative except in a few details the thoughts which it expressed were not original now they were a blend of the positivism of the vienna circle which i also ascribed to vidcon stein plus the reductive empiricism which I had taken from Hume and Russell okay no surprises there plus get this the analytic approach of GE Moore and his disciples now what do you remember a chi e more why he was a realist not a phenomenal well that doesn't influence a he remains a phenomenal Asst but he was interested in conceptual analysis rather than strictly logical analysis yes and you'll be hard pushed to find in a book the kind of logical atomism which we found in Russell and Vidkun Stein it's a loose a kind of analysis but add to that that more while a conceptual and have an analyst a conceptual analyst is still an empiricist who's constantly making distinctions between analytic and synthetic statements as if those two are exhaustive categories remember his argument in his refutation of idealism about the statement to be is to be perceived so the influence of Moore is at least humanizing the language of the approach and those with a dash added of pragmatism from CI Louis CI Louis of American pragmatist of thing his forties pragmatism yeah for pragmatic purposes all you need is a phenomenal list account you'll find him something that sort of thing well he goes on I began with a summary trial and execution of metaphysics using the verification principle as an axe arguing then that if philosophy was to make any independent contradiction to not contribution to knowledge it could consist only in the practice of analysis philosophy it's one function is analysis analysis of the meaning of language in order to clear up puzzles confusions in traditional philosophy particularly in metaphysics so though his own words and that's the direction that he took well any questions comments next time we'll do some commentary on a well you last it and my voice lasted okay I guess we'll call it a day

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Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2015