Logical Po sitivism
- Historical Background
- Political Climate
- Language and Abstract Entities
- Methodology
- Meaningful Statements: Verification
- Justified Scientific Claims
- Deductive Arguments
- Instrumentalism
- Weaknesses of Positivism
- Ethics
- Wittgenstein Distances Himself from Positivism
- Works Cited
Historical Background
"On Logical Positivism" by Susan J. Fleck. March, 1994.
During the 1920's and 1930's, logical positivism was a revolutionary and powerful force in philosophy which declared metaphysical, theological, and ethical pronouncements as lacking of cognitive meaning, and therefore beyond the boundaries of rational philosophical discussion. Positivists placed high value on physical science, mathematics and logic. This paper will examine the methodology of logical positivism: (1) its historical background; (2) how it attempts to solve philosophical problems; (3) how it sweeps metaphysical questions under the rug as meaningless, and (4) some fundamental weaknesses with logical positivism. The methodology involves six main aspects which we will briefly explore: language; concepts; verification of meaning; justification of claims; logic; and instrumentalism.
Let us first examine some of the historical background leading up to and providing the climate for this approach to philosophy. Newton wrote the Principia in 1686 in response to the accepted Cartesian principles of physics. Descartes was responding to the Aristotelian claim that we perceived reality directly by our senses, and therefore qualities such as 'red' and 'heat' were categories of being really within objects. Descartes' rejected this and replaced it with his mechanical theory of nature:
| ". . . bodies comprise only particles of matter in motion, and all their apparent qualities (extension alone excluded) are merely sensations excited by bodies in motion impinging on the nerves. . . . The familiar world of sensory experience turns out to be a mere illusion . . . The world is a machine, composed of inert bodies, moved by physical necessity, indifferent to the existence of thinking beings." (1, 6) |
From these views, Descartes made up all kinds of stories to explain how e.g. magnetism and other phenomena
worked. None of his explanations could
be tested or proved, and it was because of this that
Physical science continued to gain momentum and status, bringing tangible benefits to people. What about the social sciences? August Comte (1840), known as the father of modern Sociology, is significant because of his attitude. Until then, people tended to just theorize instead of gather empirical data. He realized that in order to move social science up to the level of physical science, you must gather data first, and then make statements. This view is Positivism. By 1870 science had started to boom. But you needed a lot of money for experiments and to support teaching science in universities. Ernst Mach, physicist, borrowed ideas from Comte to show why the old way of theorizing was 'dead wrong' - why you must have empirical data to have a fundamental distinction between metaphysical speculation (philosophy) and scientific inquiry. He wrote a philosophy of science to justify why money was needed. (2, Dec. 92)
Then along came Einstein's
'awareness' of relativity
(1905). His theory caused a crisis in
philosophy when he showed that space and time were not anything like what
This provided a basis for the Vienna
Circle (1918 - 1927), a group of very famous people
which met in
Po litical Climate
We have been examining the historical background in terms of the
progression of science. But that
progression does not happen in a vacuum.
The political climate of the time when the
What were there views and methods? Positivism comes in degrees. It is not something you either are or are not, unless you are extreme, rather, it is a description of language. Is your language positivist? That depends on how closely it is related to empirical data acquired through sensory experience. A knowledge claim derives its meaning either empirically, or it is analytically true due to the definitions of the concepts involved (e.g. all bachelors are single). If we only have enough empirical data (facts) and frame our statements and questions correctly, we can eliminate most of the confusion handed down to us through the ages.
Language and Abstract Entities
How do positivists use language to deal with abstract entities? Are there really numbers, properties, space-time points, propositions, and even things themselves? Rudolf Carnap's article "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" deals with the implications of accepting language which refers to these kind of entities. Empiricists have always been suspicious of abstract entities such as properties and numbers and try to stick to nominalistic language - to not have references to these entities. For example, if the whole of mathematics were treated as a mere calculus, a formal system where no interpretation can be given, then the mathematician speaks not about numbers, functions and infinite classes, but about meaningless symbols and formulas manipulated according to given formal rules. Within the field of semantics, the theory of meaning and truth in language forms, some declare that certain expressions designate certain entities, some of which are concrete material things, and some of which are abstract entities. Others object, claiming that this designation violates the basic principle of empiricism and leads back to a metaphysical ontology of the platonic kind. Carnap sets out to show that using such language does not imply embracing a Platonic ontology, but rather that it is compatible with empiricism and strictly scientific thinking. (3,)
Take the world of things - the simplest kind of entities we deal with in everyday language. We accept the thing language with its framework which enables us to ask and answer internal questions like "Is there a white piece of paper on my desk?," "Did King Arthur actually live?," "Are unicorns and centaurs real or merely imaginary?". These are answered by empirical investigations, their results evaluated according to certain rules as confirming or disconfirming evidence for possible answers. "To recognize something as a real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the system of things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with the other things recognized as real, according to the rules of the framework." External questions about the reality of the thing world itself is only asked by philosophers. Realists say 'yes' and subjective idealists say 'no' ... and the controversy goes on. We could choose to not continue using the ordinary thing language, instead using a language of sense-data or "phenomenal" entities, or to construct another language structure entirely - or we could just refrain from speaking! However, none of those alternatives are practical, and that is Carnap's point. He says that the acceptance and use of thing language should not be interpreted as meaning that one believes in the reality of the thing world, but merely as an acceptance of a certain form of language; to accept rules for forming statements and for testing, accepting, or rejecting them. "But the thesis of the reality of the thing world cannot be among these statements, because it cannot be formulated in the thing language or, it seems, in any other theoretical language." (3,)
Methodology
What if you were asked how many happy people were in the classroom right now? What would be your method for counting them? What counts as being happy? - someone who has a smile on their face? This is the kind of procedure a positivist would go through to clarify and define the concepts involved in a statement or proposition. Usually, some operational definition is agreed upon, in order to determine what kinds of empirical sense data can be gathered. Sissy, in Hard Times, who had grown up in the circus, was unable to define a horse, as Bitzer could define it, per Gradgrind's satisfaction. The full horseness is within this definition. This is an example of an analysis (of concepts - i.e. what do you mean by horse?): You cut something up into little pieces, which works great in physics - you cut up the horse into a lot of little pieces; i.e. say something about it mouth, teeth, etc., and you can define what a horse is. You must limit yourself to facts, what you can observe, versus values. Logical positivists restrict the agenda of philosophy. As the schoolmaster in Dickens' Hard Times says: "Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. . . . You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them" (1, 13). Friedman, in "The Methodology of Positive Economics" says: "Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments. As Keynes says, it deals with 'what is', not with 'what ought to be'" (1, 17).
Logical Positivists will talk about cognitive values; cognitive meaning - what does a statement mean, insofar as it relates to the physical conditions of the world, as apart from its emotive / connotative aspects. While Hitler had immense emotive impact, what he was saying, had little cognitive meaning. When he said "Deutschland! Deutschland! Deutschland!" over and over - what was he saying? - why did people respond to this? Take the metaphysical statement "God loves us." What love is or means is known through experience. But what does "love" in this statement mean? Could it mean that God has certain feelings in our regard, of the type that we feel when we love someone? Not if we think God cannot have "feelings" (or any other anthropomorphic quality). We could go on to speculate on various aspects of the meaning of this statement, but if we cannot define the words which is in terms of providing data of experience, it becomes meaningless. To logical positivists, these kinds of statements have only emotional significance (4, 38).
Meaningful Statements: Verification
A statement is meaningful if there is a clear way of determining whether it is true or false. The logical positivists declared that the factual meaning of empirical statements consists in "the method of their verification." This slogan drew sharp criticism, and indeed when taken literally is an inadequate formulation. Rather, positivists such as Carnap and Schlick were concerned with testability rather than verifiability. Later, this evolved to even more tolerant words such as confirmability or dis-confirmability. Popper pointed out that there can be no conclusive verification of scientific hypotheses or theories; but at best they can be shown to be refutable (5, 5 - 6 : Herbert Feigl ). However, it was common among logical positivists to declare all talk about God, values, religious, etc. as meaningless (even though they are the most important things in most people's lives) - because these statements cannot convey knowledge. Schlick, in his writings, clarified the distinction between empirically testable assertions of reality and empirically untestable ones. The latter, belong to traditional metaphysics using intuitive and "ineffable" notion of reality, which could not possibly supply any meaning to the cognitive, scientific concept of existence. These expressive and evocative uses of language belongs to "life itself" and is best left to poetry, music and the arts in general. Knowledge proper can be concerned only with the structural features of the world, and must remain silent in regards to its purely qualitative contents (5, 15 - Feigl). (Stick to the facts, and please do not fancy!)
Justified Scientific Claims
In addition to verifiability, or testability, or confirmability, with
positivism there is emphasis on the way scientific claims are justified,
rather than the "context of
discovery"; i.e. if you want to
know how Newton thought up the theory of gravitation - go ask someone
else. The positivists want to define what gravitation is and verify how it works. What is the cognitive meaning of the claims?
- how are they justified? I do not have
to worry about the meaning of life. Philosophers,
then, were just logicians (and very boring).
You did not worry about where a theory came from, nor where it was
going. They tried to make philosophy
scientific, which made it get more and more sophisticated in terms of
mathematics and logic, yet more removed from the real science that went on in the labs.
| ". . .but though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. . . . But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. . . . And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea." (1, 3 & 5) |
Deductive Arguments
As has been mentioned above, most of the positivists were scientists and specifically physicists. Putting that fact together with the above explained aspects of positivist methodology, it is not hard to understand why there is a very heavy emphasis on logic. Reading papers from these philosophers is much like reading papers on mathematics (good bed-time reading - not!). Positivists claim that all scientific knowledge is due to deductive arguments, where you show that the conclusion follows from the premises (which are correctly constructed language concepts). They use a Hypothetico-deductive mode of confirmation: that is where experiments are done to test the hypothesis and prediction. From a hypothesis you deduce a prediction, which is confirmed (or dis-confirmed) with observation and evidence. If the hypothesis is true and the auxiliary assumptions are true, then the prediction follows. There may be all sorts of things you have to assume; e.g. that the equipment is functioning properly (within accepted parameters, as Data would say), and that you are dealing with a 'closed' system in which there are no things influencing your experiment.
Instrumentalism
Scientific theories are generally interpreted in a pragmatic and instrumentalist fashion. They are judged according to how well they can be used as "instruments" to provide accurate explanations and predictions of observable phenomena. Predictive accuracy is what is important. Friedman demonstrates this point in his claim: "Its task [positive economics] is to provide a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances. Its performance is to be judged by the precision, scope, and conformity with experience of the predictions it yields" (1, 17). An attitude that people have about scientific theories is that they should act like instruments - be good tools of prediction, versus Realism, where the goal of scientific theories it to show the true description of nature. As an analogy, a tack hammer will not be a good instrument to knock in some posts, while a sledge hammer is poor for putting in thumbtacks. Which is the true hammer? A good instrument allows you to make accurate predictions.
Copernicus' book has an instrumentalist preface. It stated that Copernicus' system was just for calculating and predicting without believing that it had anything to do with the truth of how the real universe was structured. Another good example of instrumentalism is Bohr's theory of atom, with the model of a nucleus and electron orbits. This works and gives accurate predictions. Does this mean you have to believe that an atom has a 'dot' nucleus in the center with an electron circling which sometimes makes that quantum 'leap' into another orbit once in a while? No- it is just part of the imagery that goes on in describing, or explaining scientific facts and events. Another interesting aspect of instrumentalism is explained by Friedman:
| "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are widely inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (model) . . . A hypothesis is important if it 'explains' much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions;. . ." (1, 21) |
For example, the theory of gravitation is wildly unrealistic. I.e. you treat Venus as just a point in describing the law of gravity. If physicists do this all the time; why cannot economists do this?
Weaknesses of Po sitivism
Now that we have explored the methods used by the positivists, let us delve a little more into the weaknesses of this system. Newton felt perfectly comfortable with deriving implications about God, whom we cannot see, about what we can observe. He thinks this is part of Natural Philosophy (which includes Physics). In the "General Scholium" he states: "We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is we know not. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; . . .". But with positivism, we are not allowed the luxury of any implications. As in Hard Times: "The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom . . . ". Thomas Gradgrind demonstrates the epitome of a positivist: "With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to" (1, 13 & 14). But why these facts, for example Bitzer's explanation of what a horse is, and not other facts? Since positivism implies that all facts are equally important, since there are no value judgments, why does Gradgrind and Choakumchild get to determine what facts determine what is enough to define a horse? Of course, Dickens is ridiculing just teaching facts, when values get ignored. Inevitably, some kind of values have to be introduced in order to make sense of facts.
Aesthetics, which an ordinary person thinks must involve value judgments, is also discussed in Hard Times: Would you put horses on your walls? Would you put flowers on a rug? Would you want flowers on a place where people walk? This is the reduction of aesthetic values to facts. Art should reflect reality!!! Taste (in wallpaper) is just a matter of fact; of getting your aesthetic values right (in line with reality). "What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact." Girl number 20 said about flowers in her carpeting: "They wouldn't crush and wither if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy - ". . . "But you musn't fancy." replied the gentleman "You are to be in all things regulated and governed " (by commissioners of fact who will force the people to be a people of fact.) (1, 15 &16).
Friedman thinks that positive economics "can be an 'objective' science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences." He immediately points out the problem with this: "Of course, the fact that economics deals with the interrelations of human beings, and that the investigator is himself part of the subject-matter being investigated in a more intimate sense than in the physical sciences, raises special difficulties in achieving objectivity . . ." (1, 17). He goes on to explain other problems with positivism: "Observed facts are necessarily finite in number; possible hypotheses, infinite. If there is one hypothesis that is consistent with the available evidence, there are always an infinite number that are" (1, 19). For example, excise tax produces a rise in price equal to amount of tax; this is consistent with competitive conditions, a stable demand curve, etc. etc. "The choice among alternative hypotheses equally consistent with the available evidence must to some extent be arbitrary . . .".
Ethics
But what about ethical statements? Coplestone argues against the viewpoint that these are also "meaningless" and have only emotional significance. He gives an example where one person declares it murder if a doctor gives a patient dying of cancer a lethal overdose of a drug, while another declares it an act of charity. Argument is possible if they can agree on a definition of murder - whether the definition covers euthanasia or not. But if they differ in their definitions of murder, further argument would be fruitless. There needs to be common ground between disputants if an argument is to be fruitful. This is not peculiar to ethics. Probably, the reason why logical positivists say that ethical statements are non-significant and that they possess only emotive significance is that they cannot be verified. We cannot indicate "what would be the case" if they were true. We cannot obtain observation-statements from them, which are empirically verifiable. "But to say this is to say little more than that ethical statements are not statements of empirical science. Who supposes that they are? Again we are faced with the underlying assumption that all that can be known can be known by means of science" (4, 40).
Wittgenstein Distances Himself from Positivism
Stephen E. Toulmin shows how Wittgenstein, one of the inspirations for the movement, eventually distanced himself from the logical positivists. He had meant to reveal philosophical difficulties in his Tractatus, and these were being overlooked and unresolved, while new doctrines were formulated. Toulmin explains how Wittgenstein saw the positivists once again returning to Hume -
| ". . . with "sensations," and "sense data," standing in for "impressions" and statements that record "impressions". . . . This formal ensemble of possibilities - this "symbolism," "mode of representation," or "language" - could never be anchored logically to the world we use it to describe, because logical relations hold only within a symbolism. No set of authentic definitions can be contrived which will by itself transform the Newtonian formalism, or any other set of symbolic articulations, into a plain description of the world: if we do use the possibilities defined by such a theory as the stock-in-trade of our scientific descriptions and explanations, that fact inevitably remains a fact as much about us as about the world. "That Newtonian mechanics can be used to describe the world," Wittgenstein had declared, "tells us nothing about the world. But this does tell us something - that it can be used to describe the world in the way in which we do in fact use it." . . . The crucial idea of "ostensive definitions," by which the logical positivists had hoped to account for the connection between language and the world, was delusory. In the last resort the connections between the linguistic realm and the world - the meanings, uses, or modes d'emploi it involves - cannot be made a matter for formal definitions: they are something which we must simply "catch on to."" (5, 38-39) |
The logical positivists had great ambitions and intentions. The desired to deal with (1) the problem of the meaning of meanings; (2) the ineffability of theological concepts (by dismissing them as meaningless); (3) the meaningless dribble and declarations people are prone to make; (4) the power and negative impact of the political persuasiveness of charismatic leaders; and most of all (5) to anchor knowledge. Where the cycle seemed to have started with Descartes, who also had the burning desire to anchor knowledge once and for all, it is not yet over. While the positivists have left a legacy that still influences various spheres of knowledge, as a philosophical system it has pretty much died because of all the inherent weaknesses as described above. The positivists acted somewhat like Choakumchild in Hard Times: "Ah, rather overdone, M'Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!" (1, 16).
Works Cited
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by Milton Friedman from Essays in
Positive Economics, Part I, sections 1,2,3 and 6;
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Frederick. CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY : Studiess of Logical Positivism and
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MLA style guidelines, using the number system for parenthetical documentation.
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