Logical Positivism

11 Key excerpts on "Logical Positivism"

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  Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IX

  Philosophy of the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century 1: Science, Logic and Mathematics

  • S. G. Shanker(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It was claimed by members of the movement that they had noticed something about existing and traditional philosophy, which would completely overturn it and render it largely otiose. There appeared articles with such titles as ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’ (Carnap [5.5]) and ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ (Schlick [5.24]). Carnap posed the question: ‘Can it be that so many men, of various times and nations, outstanding minds among them, have devoted so much effort, and indeed fervour, to metaphysics, when this consists of nothing more than words strung together without sense?’ International conferences were called with a view to disseminating the new ‘insights’, and a grandiose project, The Encyclopedia of Unified Science, was launched to give definitive expression to the new ‘scientific’ era in which philosophical and other discourse would become part of the discourse of science. In these circumstances it was not surprising that critics of the new ideas were more than usually prompt, forthright and thorough in their criticisms. Nevertheless, Logical Positivism has an established place in the history and continuing development of philosophy. At least three reasons might be given for this. One is purely historical, regarding the considerable impact and influence of the movement in its heyday. A second lies in the intrinsic interest of its ideas, which I hope to bring out in what follows. A third lies in the fact that even if no one today would call himself a logical positivist, some of its main positions, such as verificationism, and emotivism in ethics, are still referred to as parameters within which discussions of particular topics, such as ethics or the philosophy of religion or of science, are to be conducted. Again, it can be argued that even if the parent plant is dead, many of its seeds are alive and active in one form or another

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  Conceptual Foundations of Social Research Methods

  • David Baronov(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to examine Logical Positivism as a distinct moment in the long life of positivism. At the core of Logical Positivism is a near-obsessive focus on the use of language within scientific inquiry. This grew out of a simmering disquiet in the early twentieth century regarding the meaning and validity of scientific statements. The problem was no longer determining what was true and what was false. The problem was finding a meaningful and universal language to convey what was true and what was false. In this regard, the work of Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) in the realm of empiricism and that of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in the realm of logic provide essential bridges between nineteenth-century embryonic positivism and twentieth-century Logical Positivism. As evidence of the varied and at times confusing interpretations of positivism in the latter nineteenth century, all three of these contributors actively dissociated themselves from the term “positivist.”

  All of the issues and debates discussed in this chapter can be considered foundational for the practice of standard social science research today. Of all the chapters of this book, however, the present chapter concerns an intellectual movement whose proponents made the fewest explicit links to the social sciences. The early proponents of Logical Positivism took the physical sciences as their immediate subject of concern. It was not until later, by means of gradual extension, that the arguments of Logical Positivism were systematically applied to the social sciences.

  WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM ?

  Logical Positivism emerged, in large measure, from the gallant efforts of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius to purge the last surviving remnants of subjectivity from scientific inquiry. Of particular concern was the extent to which the individual characteristics of an investigator were allowed to influence a study’s results. Such results would be unique to the individual investigator and thus would not constitute a general finding—the essential building block of scientific knowledge. Efforts to eliminate the influence of the individual investigator within scientific inquiry are referred to as empiriocriticism.

  The goal of empiriocriticism is to represent phenomena as they truly are, through “pure experience”—untainted by the role of the investigator. Importantly, proponents of Logical Positivism do not advocate a retreat to pure objectivism. This would suggest a utopian vision, completely separating the investigator from the research process. Rather, there is an attempt to clearly define and narrowly circumscribe the role of the investigator within scientific inquiry. Within this framework, the investigator does not represent a passive reflection of reality but remains an active agent in the production of knowledge.

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  Philosophy of Science, Logic and Mathematics in the 20th Century

  Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 9

  • Stuart G. Shanker, Stuart G. Shanker(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It was claimed by members of the movement that they had noticed something about existing and traditional philosophy, which would completely overturn it and render it largely otiose. There appeared articles with such titles as ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’ (Carnap [ 5.5 ]) and ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ (Schlick [ 5.24 ]). Carnap posed the question: ‘Can it be that so many men, of various times and nations, outstanding minds among them, have devoted so much effort, and indeed fervour, to metaphysics, when this consists of nothing more than words strung together without sense?’ International conferences were called with a view to disseminating the new ‘insights’, and a grandiose project, The Encyclopedia of Unified Science, was launched to give definitive expression to the new ‘scientific’ era in which philosophical and other discourse would become part of the discourse of science. In these circumstances it was not surprising that critics of the new ideas were more than usually prompt, forthright and thorough in their criticisms. Nevertheless, Logical Positivism has an established place in the history and continuing development of philosophy. At least three reasons might be given for this. One is purely historical, regarding the considerable impact and influence of the movement in its heyday. A second lies in the intrinsic interest of its ideas, which I hope to bring out in what follows. A third lies in the fact that even if no one today would call himself a logical positivist, some of its main positions, such as verificationism, and emotivism in ethics, are still referred to as parameters within which discussions of particular topics, such as ethics or the philosophy of religion or of science, are to be conducted. Again, it can be argued that even if the parent plant is dead, many of its seeds are alive and active in one form or another. In an interview in 1979, A. J

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  Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense

  • S. Chapman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The logical positivists allowed that a statement was meaningful in three separate cases: if it was analytic, the meanings of the individual words it contained making it necessarily true, determined by the language itself: if it was a statement of logic or mathematics, which Whitehead and Russell had demonstrated could be seen as tautologous formulas within a closed system: or if it made a claim about the world that was amenable to being verified by experience or observation. All statements that did not fall into one of these three categories were simply meaningless and fit only to be dismissed from serious philosophical discussion. This included statements of religious belief or ethical judgement. It also included the statements of metaphysics. There was, for instance, no objective way of verifying the claim that the world was composed of basic facts. The difference over metaphysics reflects a difference in the basic purpose or motivation of the logical atomists and the logical positivists in conducting analysis. For the atomists the purpose of analysis was to move from the imperfections of ordinary language to a better form of words that would offer a more precise picture of the structure of the world. The positivists were generally scientists by training and by inclination. Their ambition was a language, as unlike ordinary natural language as was necessary, that could precisely and unambiguously report the findings of science and therefore the positive knowledge of the world that was available to humans. So for them the purpose of analysis was to guard against meaningless expressions taking an unmerited place in serious philosophical and scientific discussion. For the logical positivists, unlike for the logical atomists, the analysis of language was both the means of philosophical progress and an end in itself

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  The Philosophy of Social Research

  • John A. Hughes, W. W. Sharrock(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  independent observational evidence. The theories must, therefore, be of such clarity as to permit an unequivocal comparison with the facts so that one could definitely tell whether the- occurrences logically implied by a theory did or did not prescribe what was observed to occur. If it did correspond then the theory was true; if not, then it was false. Later, in the hands of the logical positivists, whether or not a theory could be 'cashed out' in terms of such unequivocally confirming or falsifying observation statements would become a criterion for the very meaningfulness of the theory and a way, thereby, of distinguishing scientific statements from metaphysical ones.

  The logical positivists

  The logical positivists propounded what is perhaps the clearest and most influential version of positivism in the twentieth century. The group began in Vienna in the late 1920s under the leadership of Ernst Mach, Mauritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap.2 They were to give positivistic philosophy of science a shape and system which served to make it the predominant view of the first half of the twentieth century.

  As with other forms of positivism they rejected metaphysics by recognising only two kinds of proposition: the analytic and the synthetic. Analytic propositions include those of mathematics and logic which themselves say nothing about the empirical facts of the world but are true or false by virtue of the rules and definitions of the formal system to. which they belong. Thus, the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 is true because of the definitions contained in the number system used, in the same way that 'This red book is coloured' is tautologically true by virtue of the connection between the words 'red' and 'coloured'. 'Red' is one coloured word among others, and so to use one of the coloured words is just to say that it is coloured. To say 'This red book is not coloured' would be to contradict oneself. By contrast, the truth of synthetic propositions is verified by empirical observation: that is, by determining whether or not what the proposition says corresponds with the facts of the world. The truth of the proposition, 'This book is red' does not depend on the meaning of its constituent words, but on what the actual colour of the book so identified is. If the book is, in fact, coloured green, then the proposition is false. Whether the proposition is true or false can be determined by looking to see what the colour of the book is. However, statements which are neither tautologies nor empirical statements are not propositions and are meaningless.

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  Verificationism

  Its History and Prospects

  • C.J. Misak(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Carnap, Frank, Godel, Tarski, Reichenbach, Hempel and von Mises made their way to universities in the United States. Neurath eventually joined Ayer in England. Logical Positivism was thus very effectively introduced to the rest of the Western intellectual world and it quickly became one of the most influential views on the philosophical scene.

  We shall see that despite significant differences in the views of the various logical positivists, and despite the eventual weakening of their positions, certain themes initially bind them together. They take Hume’s starting point as their guiding thought: our beliefs, if they are justified, are justified by the data of experience.6 This leads to the claim that science is the paradigm of rational knowledge and that metaphysics is the antithesis of it.7 Like Russell and Wittgenstein, they felt they had an important resource which was unavailable to previous empiricists: the symbolic logic which was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. That logic was at the very centre of their program and, we shall see, at the very centre of many of the difficulties which that program encountered.

  Domains of knowledge, it was argued, could achieve clarity by being symbolized in the language of logic. A scientific theory, on this view, is a deductive formal system—an axiomatic system which is given empirical meaning by definitions which hook up the primitive terms in the formal language with observables in the world. Theoretical terms are merely abbreviations of observational terms, the abbreviations being explicit definitions or logical equivalences. Like the early Wittgenstein, the logical positivists wanted to produce a ‘logic of language’ which would match the logical structure of the world.

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  Philosophy Of Language

  • Alex Miller(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Sense and Verificationism: Logical Positivism 3.1 Introduction

  In Chapters 1 and 2 we looked at some aspects of Frege’s attempt to systematize our intuitive notion of meaning. In this chapter we will look at another attempt: that carried out by the logical positivists. Logical Positivism was a school of philosophy, centred in Vienna, that grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, and which was institutionalized in the “Vienna Circle”. The leading figure in the Circle was Moritz Schlick, and it counted amongst its supporters such philosophers as Neurath, Waissman, Feigl, Gödel, Ayer, Carnap and Hahn. The main philosophical influences on the Circle stemmed from Hume, Berkeley, Frege, Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. The theory of meaning was central to the Circle’s concerns: the motivation was the thought that clarity about the concept of meaning would help in getting clear on the proper scope and extent of philosophical enquiry itself. This would then help remedy the fact that philosophy, unlike science, appeared to make little or no progress either in the prosecution of its central concerns, or on the question as to how those concerns are properly to be conceived. What is required, they thought, was an account of what constitutes meaningfulness: and the logical positivists attempted to give such an account via the provision of a criterion of significance. Such a criterion would give a systematic account of what counts, and what does not count, as literally meaningful or significant, or, alternatively, as possessing sense: if a sentence satisfies the criterion it counts as possessing sense, whereas if it fails to satisfy the criterion it counts as literally meaningless. The provision of such a criterion would greatly aid the progress of philosophy by ensuring that philosophers do not get embroiled in literally meaningless metaphysical speculation: if the criterion of significance entails that sentences apparently about God, the nature of moral and aesthetic facts, or about a reality that transcends the world of experience, are, appearances to the contrary, actually senseless, then we will have a clear explanation of why the metaphysical speculation about the truth

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  Analytic Philosophy

  An Interpretive History

  • Aaron Preston(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10

  From Scientific to Analytic

  Remarks on How Logical Positivism Became a Chapter of Analytic Philosophy Alan Richardson

  Timothy Williamson (2014) has recently begun to scout the terrain of the “transformation of analytic philosophy” from a broadly but deeply anti-metaphysical project to one that embraces speculative metaphysics. The two anti-metaphysical projects of pre-reformation analytic philosophy that Williamson deploys to frame his historical puzzle are Logical Positivism and ordinary language philosophy. My concern is different from Williamson’s. I am interested in how Logical Positivism came to be a project within analytic philosophy. This is a story that predates the rise of ordinary language philosophy.1 It takes us back to a time when British analytic philosophy was not most importantly an anti-metaphysical project. It is a story of how Logical Positivism was read by the first group of scholars who were denominated by the term, “analytic philosophers,” the Cambridge analysts of the 1930s (Beaney 2013, 12).

  What Was Logical Positivism Before It Was Analytic?

  When Logical Positivism was forming itself into a coherent project in Vienna, Berlin, Prague and a few other places in middle Europe in the 1920s, there was no tradition yet called “analytic philosophy” for it to belong to. Moreover, while all the logical positivists found some role in philosophy for some form of analysis—and some found the only proper method of philosophy to be logical analysis—for none of them was making philosophy analytic the final goal. It was rather the means to a substantially more important and more ambitious goal: to make philosophy properly scientific. The favored term for some of the Vienna Circle and for their compatriots in Berlin was, thus, “wissenschaftliche Philosophie ,” scientific philosophy. While Hans Reichenbach distanced himself from positivism and favored the term (which became the more ubiquitous one for the project) “logical empiricism,” his book, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy

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  Philosophy of Language

  • Alexander Miller(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In §3.2 and §3.3 we look at the attempt to spell out the verification principle in Language, Truth, and Logic, the classic popularisation of the logical positivist doctrine by A. J. Ayer (1910–1989); and in §3.4 we investigate the positivist account of the a priori, via a discussion of Chapter 4 of that work, and we’ll see how Ayer attempts to find a place for philosophy itself as an a priori activity. The dichotomy between statements which are meaningful in virtue of being empirically verifiable, and statements which are true purely in virtue of meaning, receives further development in the famous distinction between internal and external questions developed by Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970): that distinction is the subject of §3.5. In §3.6 we briefly consider the impact of the logical positivist theory of meaning on ethical language. Finally, in §3.7 we look at some further aspects of Ayer’s views on empirically verifiable statements: this sets the scene for Quine’s assault on the logical positivists’ theory of meaning, which is the subject of our next chapter. p.117 3.2 The formulation of the verification principle The verification principle can be summed up in Schlick’s famous slogan, “the meaning of a statement consists in its method of verification”. Statements which qualify as literally meaningful in virtue of being associated with a method of empirical verification are deemed to possess factual meaning : statements can thus be literally meaningful without possessing factual meaning if they are a priori and analytic (tautologies, in the terminology favoured by Ayer)

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  Ernst Cassirer

  The Last Philosopher of Culture

  • Edward Skidelsky(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms attempts, as we have seen, to partially undo this process of alienation and fragmentation. It extends a “ladder” between science and the other cultural forms, revealing them as products of the same underlying symbolic capacity. Only thus—so runs the thought—can science win over those standing beyond its frontier. Logical Positivism has nothing to say to such people. Its defense of reason remains purely hermetic or inward looking. It ignores the need to which Cassirer’s philosophy is addressed—namely, that of making the normative force of science visible from the outside.

  This difference of approach is reflected in a starkly contrasting attitude to history. The logical positivists regarded the metaphysics of the past as an obstruction pure and simple. Their technical innovations had the ultimate purpose of sweeping away “the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia” so as to reveal the common ground of “simple human experience.”5 From Cassirer’s point of view, this is a senseless endeavor. There is no such thing as simple human experience free from the taint of metaphysics or religion. Metaphysical ideas have always been inextricably involved in the development of empirical science; they have assisted in “the conquest and intellectual opening up and interpretation of particular fields of knowledge and meaning.”6 Metaphysics requires not elimination but critique . Its central concepts must be reinterpreted in a purely “regulative” manner. Only thus can their positive scientific achievement be preserved even as their dogmatic pretensions are demolished.

  This difference of attitude toward the philosophy of the past can be understood in biographical as well as systematic terms. The logical positivists belonged to the generation that came to intellectual maturity during or immediately after the First World War. Like many of their contemporaries, they gratefully renounced all debts to what they regarded as a dead civilization. The metaphysics of the nineteenth century—complex, historical, allusive—appeared to them nothing more than the corrupt superstructure of industrial capitalism, or else a projection of infantile desires and fears. Their work exudes a longing for new beginnings, for fresh air. “What has history to do with me?” wrote Wittgenstein in his wartime notebooks. “Mine is the first and only world!”7

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  A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy

  From Russell to Rawls

  • Stephen P. Schwartz(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless ” (Carnap 1959a/1932, pp. 60–1). The logical positivists thought that their logical or semantic elimination of metaphysics was more solid and decisive than any attack on metaphysics that was based on such pragmatic considerations as the inability of metaphysicians to solve real world problems, their inability to agree on any results, or on psychological claims about the supposed weakness of the human intellect.

  The positivists' elimination caught on. It especially appealed to those hard-minded scientists and mathematicians who disliked philosophy anyway. They felt this was a salutary clearing away of the vestiges of medieval pseudo-science posing as deep thinking. (As a young professor in the mid-1970s I proposed to teach a course titled “Introduction to Metaphysics.” Offering this new course required approval by a faculty curriculum committee composed of non-philosophers. Approval was denied on the grounds that “there is no such subject. It has been eliminated.” The committee changed its decision when I explained somewhat disingenuously that I meant to teach the history of metaphysics—you know, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, those guys.)

  The logic-based attack on metaphysics (and ethics, aesthetics, and theology) was distilled into what is one of the most famous slogans of philosophy—the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness. “We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express …” (Ayer 1946/1936, p. 35). Of course, this needs to be qualified in many ways. Verification need not be conclusive or no general propositions would be meaningful. Also there may be practical problems involved with verification, so a proposition need only be verifiable in principle. The statements of mathematics, including geometry and logic, are meaningful according to Ayer and Carnap (pace Wittgenstein) but are tautologies. So a more complete and guarded version of the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness would go as follows: “A putative proposition is meaningful if and only if it is weakly verifiable in principle or it is a tautology or self-contradiction.” “Weakly verifiable” means that it need not be conclusively verifiable, and “in principle” is intended to avoid practical limits to verification.

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