Logical Positivism Quotes

He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void.

Postmodernism's specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose "unmasking" strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism were used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is a natural successor in the role. [The Sleep of Reason]

Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence. The question itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon for philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn with the wreckage of theories of consciousness. After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science – intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and, most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment. Philosophers flourish in these various endeavors, but for the time being, at least, and by a process of elimination, the solution of the riddle has been left to science. What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step. (9-10)

Mental obsession, or going over and over something, is a part of the addictive cycle. It is also addictive in itself. I mentioned earlier the ego defense called “isolation of affect.” By focusing on a recurring thought you can avoid painful feelings. You can also avoid feelings by ruminating, turning thoughts over and over in your head. You can be addicted to abstract thinking. One of my degrees is in philosophy. I spent years of my life studying the great philosophers. In itself this is not harmful. For me, the reading and teaching of philosophy was a way out of my feelings. When I was reading the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Wittgenstein’s treatise on logical positivism, I could completely mood-alter my toxic shame. Intellectualizing is often a way to avoid internal states that are shame-bound. One’s very way of intellectualizing can be addictive. Generalizing and universalizing keep one in categories so broad and abstract that there’s no contact with concrete, specific, sensory-based reality. Abstract generalizing is a marvelous way to mood-alter.

Wither knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him.

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.

Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted. A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience.

It was, as Berlin remembered it: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scholar Erasmus played around with it, 3 and Berlin couldn’t help doing the same. Might it become a scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust would all have been hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce were obviously foxes. So was Berlin, who distrusted most big things—like logical positivism—but felt fully at ease with smaller ones. 4 Diverted by World War II, Berlin didn’t return to his quadrupeds until 1951, when he used them to frame an essay he was preparing on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. It appeared two years later as a short book, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.” It might even reflect “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.

To determine the truth or falsity of a statement you not only need to a set of special experiences, but you need to know the truth of falsity of a host of other different statements as well. That is, verifying that the cat is on the mat is not a matter of experience alone, but of accepting all sorts of other different statements, all the way from "Light rays travel in straight lines" to "I am not having another one of those darn flashbacks." "Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist’s verifiability criterion of meaning.

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

humanity. The roots of the Turing Test in logical positivism and English philosophy is part of the problem. Turing was trying to find a way – not to decide the nature of humanity but whether machines could think. He saw no real distinction between whether the computer could fool an interrogator that it was human and whether it was actually thinking. In 1980 the English philosopher John Searle published his assault in an important philosophical article. It included with a story called ‘The Chinese Room’. Imagine a sealed room with a man who doesn’t understand Chinese inside, said Searle. Imagine he gets messages in Chinese, looks them up in a lexicon and finds them associated with other Chinese characters, which he passes back – without knowing that the messages he is getting are questions and the messages he is sending are answers. Now, the man might be able to convince the equivalent of Turing’s interrogator that he could understand Chinese, but actually he couldn’t.

A second philosophical development that contributed to emotivism was the rise of logical positivism. Logical positivists claimed that only two types of statements are possible: (1) analytical statements, such as definitions, and (2) factual statements that are empirically verifiable.

The terminology "analytic-synthetic" was introduced by Kant. Although the distinction itself looks uncontroversial, it can be made to do real philosophical work. Here is one crucial piece of work the logical positivists saw for it: they claimed that all of mathematics and logic is analytic. This made it possible for them to deal with mathematical knowledge within an empiricist framework. For logical positivism, mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way. Synthetic claims about the world can be expressed using mathematical language, such as when it is claimed that there are nine planets in the solar system. But proofs and investigations within mathematics itself are analytic.

Part of what facilitates this closure to alternative epistemologies within the dominant knowledge system is a tendency toward a reductivist scientism – the conviction that science is the best, if not the only, way of knowing, “that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge but rather must identify knowledge with science.”11 This tendency is apparent in the early Comtean version of positivism, where the movement of intellectual thought leads from superstition to the triumph of science, the “culminating stage of human knowledge” where “one devotes oneself to the search for relationships through observation or experimentation…the stage toward which all human history has been advancing.”12 It emerges at the beginning of the twentieth century in Max Weber's 1930 introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he comments that “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid.”13 It also surfaces mid-century in a logical positivism committed “to epistemology as the central task of philosophy, to science as the single best way of knowing, and to the unity of science as a goal and methodological principle.”14 Such scientism aids and abets the kind of cultural practices displayed in Exhibit Two (see Chapter 1). Appeals to the interests of science, to the advancement of archaeological and biological knowledge, are seen by many to trump the moral objections of indigenous peoples to the desecration of ancestral graves.

Hume, Huxley, and other "immanent " psychologists, tried to identify the conception with a mere generalisation, so making no distinction between logical and psychological thought. In doing this they ignored the power of making judgments. In every judgment there is an act of verification or of contradiction, an approval or rejection, and the standard for these judgments, the idea of truth, must be something external to that on what it is acting. If there are nothing but perceptions, then all perceptions must have an equal validity, and there can be no standard by which to form a real world. Empiricism in this fashion really destroys the reality of experience, and what is called positivism is no more than nihilism. The idea of a standard of truth, the idea of truth, cannot lie in experience. In every judgment this idea of the existence of truth is implicit. The claim to real knowledge depends on this capacity to judge, involves the conception of the possibility of truth in the judgment.

It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void.

I mean, there’s got to be an art to expounding the virtues of logical positivism while garrotting Nazis with piano wire, and it looks as if Jarrod started missing their special flair.

I like logical positivism as a technique of distinguishing what we know and what we don’t know. But I don’t like it when the logical positivist says that what we don’t know, we shouldn’t talk about anymore. I think there is no sense in stopping thought at any point. The thing is, to know what you’re talking about is what you don’t know, and admit you’re speculating. That’s proper semantic hygiene, not to stop thinking entirely but to admit you are speculating.

Logical positivism claims to lay the foundation for each step as it goes along, in a rational way. Yet in reality it puts forth no theoretical universal to validate its very first step. Positivists accept (though they present no logical reason why this should be so) that what reaches them from the “outside” may be called “data”; i.e., it has objective validity.

Bad philosophy Philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Interpretation The explanatory part of a scientific theory, supposedly distinct from its predictive or instrumental part. Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality. Positivism The bad philosophy that everything not ‘derived from observation’ should be eliminated from science. Logical positivism The bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by observation are meaningless.

Before the Enlightenment, bad philosophy was the rule and good philosophy the rare exception. With the Enlightenment came much more good philosophy, but bad philosophy became much worse, with the descent from empiricism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Wittgenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the ‘postmodernist’ and related movements. In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation. This has helped to legitimize dehumanizing explanations of human thought and behaviour. In quantum theory, bad philosophy manifested itself mainly as the Copenhagen interpretation and its many variants, and as the ‘shut-up-and-calculate’ interpretation. These appealed to doctrines such as logical positivism to justify systematic equivocation and to immunize themselves from criticism.

The construction of a "problem calculus" in the sense of Heyting and Kolmogoroff yields a model of logic in which the theorem of the excluded middle does not appear among the basic formulas. The study of such a logic widens our insight into the basic elements of mathematics and, in particular, points out the special position of the so-called indirect proofs within mathematics.

Why should we accept the verificationist principle? Have logical positivists examined every proposition ever uttered or written so that they are justified in limiting meaningful statement to those which are verified by the senses? No, of course not. In fact, logical positivists cannot consistently make any universal negative statements about the world because no human has universal experience. The statement 'No proposition is meaningful unless it is empirically verified,' is itself meaningless according to logical positivism. The verificationist principle defeats itself because it makes an unverifiable universal statement. But it also fails because it cannot be directly confirmed empirically. No one can ever experience the truth that only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful. It should also be obvious that the verificationsit principle is not true by definition. It is not a tautology and it is not an analytic truth. Thus, we must conclude that the reliance on the verificationist principle is a matter of sheer arbitrary prejudice, of blind faith. If the verificationist principle is meaningless on its own terms and refutes itself, it can hardly be used to undercut metaphysics, religious language, etc.. Logical positivism is internally flawed in another respect as well. The logical positivists promoted the verificationist principle with the hope of weeding metaphysics out of philosophy, but the empirical methods presupposed by the principle cannot stand without metaphysical underpinnings. Metaphysical beliefs about the uniformity of nature and the reliability of human senses must be assumed and defended in order for observation to be considered trustworthy.

Finally, the verificationist principle, if accepted, proved too much--or perhaps it would be better to say it took away too much. After all, verificationism ruled out all knowledge of history and scientific generalizations, a loss not even logical positivists could live with. Historical propositions rely on authority of those who observed the recorded events. Such statements are not analytic, but they are not, strictly speaking, synthetic either. Since history cannot be verified empirically apart from time travel, logical positivism must deny any meaning whatsoever to historical claims. Ironically, logical positivism ends up regulating 'historical talk' to the same category of meaninglessness as 'God talk' But logical positivism threatens the meaningfulness of scientific statements as well. Scientists hope to formulate laws that describe the world of experience, but if the verificationist principle is applied rigorously, science can never do this because universalizations can never be fully verified. The verificationsit principle will not allow universalizations to be drawn from a finite number of observations; in other words, it cannot supply a foundation for the inductive principle. The verificationist principle appears to grant science special status at first; in reality it merely cuts science loose from the theoretical or metaphysical foundation it must have in order to be a rational enterprise. To lose history and science to meaninglessness is more than most philosophers can stand.

The great intellectual threats to the ideals of the human individual and the free- dom of the human mind at that time came from the logicism of the positivists and the conformism that underwrote or underscored the ethology of the behaviorists. The great practical threats came from the false promises of Marxist-Leninism. All three movements—positivism, behaviorism, and Marxism—were tricked out in the garb of science. All three were deterministic, although not without their prescriptive programs. And all three made self-serving claims to moral and intellectual insuper- ability, historic inevitability, and permanence.

Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli- gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu- riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy- chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions, and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.

Logical Positivism: An early-twentieth-century school of philosophy that limits the scope of philosophy to the scientific method (empirical verification) and logic. Everything else philosophy once considered, such as metaphysics and ethics and theology, is tossed out the window as unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose “perfor - mance” may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his “ge - nius” The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the per - sonal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person” Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s “person” The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his “confidence.

In the twentieth century, many philosophers have utilized analytical philosophy4 as a framework for exploring the nature of moral situations and the meaning and validity of moral terms such as justice, goodness, virtue, and right. In fact, earlier in the twentieth century, one school of analytical philosophy, logical positivism, argued that ethical judgments are not really propositions or meaningful statements; they are purely emotive, arousing feeling, and hence belong to psychology or sociology.

Helen smiled, and Gödel, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin, launched into another of his ontological proofs. Even as far back as his days in the Vienna Circle, he had rejected the positivism of Bertrand Russell and his cohorts for taking much too dim a view of intuition. Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. “We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof.” Recently, however, he’d gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided. Although Einstein found such mystical speculation unpersuasive, its proponent was not so easy to dismiss out of hand. After all, whose portrait did he himself have hanging on a nail in his study upstairs? Isaac Newton, who had devoted countless hours to the lunatic aims of alchemy.