Logical positivism

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Logical positivism, also known as logical empiricism or neo-positivism, was a philosophical movement, in the

empirical science.[1]

Logical positivism's central thesis was the verification principle, also known as the "verifiability criterion of meaning", according to which a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it can be verified through empirical observation or if it is a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form).[2] The verifiability criterion thus rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless in terms of truth value or factual content. Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by mimicking the structure and process of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as an agenda to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it.[1]

The movement emerged in the late 1920s among

Berlin Circle and flourished in several European centres through the 1930s. By the end of World War II, many of its members had settled in the English-speaking world and the project shifted to less radical goals within the philosophy of science.[3]

By the 1950s, problems identified within logical positivism's central tenets became seen as intractable, drawing escalating criticism among leading philosophers, notably from

Carl Hempel. These problems would remain unresolved, precipitating the movement's eventual decline and abandonment by the 1960s. In 1967, philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".[4]

Origins

Logical positivism emerged in

Hegelian metaphysics and the work of Hegelian successors such as F. H. Bradley, whose metaphysics portrayed the world without reference to empirical observation.[5] The late 19th century also saw the emergence of neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement, in the rationalist tradition.[6]

The logical positivist program established its theoretical foundations in the

aprioricity.[9][6]

verifiability principle.[10][11] His work introduced the view of philosophy as "critique of language", discussing theoretical distinctions between intelligible and nonsensical discourse. Tractatus adhered to a correspondence theory of truth, as opposed to a coherence theory of truth. Logical positivists were also influenced by Wittgenstein's interpretation of probability though, according to Neurath, some objected to the metaphysics in Tractatus.[12]

History

Vienna and Berlin Circles

Main article: Vienna Circle

The

Carl Hempel, who studied under Reichenbach in Germany, was also to prove influential in the movement's later history.[13] A friendly but tenacious critic of the movement was Karl Popper, whom Neurath nicknamed the "Official Opposition".[14]

Early in the movement, Carnap, Hahn, Neurath and others recognised that the

verifiability criterion was too stringent in that it rejected universal statements, which are vital to scientific hypothesis.[15] A radical left wing emerged from the Vienna Circle, led by Neurath and Carnap, who proposed revisions to weaken the criterion, a program they referred to as the "liberalisation of empiricism". A conservative right wing, led by Schlick and Waismann, instead sought to classify universal statements as analytic truths, thereby to reconcile them with the existing criterion.[16] Within the liberal wing Carnap emphasised fallibilism, as well as pragmatics, which he considered integral to empiricism. Neurath prescribed a move from Mach's phenomenalism to physicalism, though this would be opposed by Schlick. As Neurath and Carnap sought to pose science toward social reform, the split in the Vienna Circle also reflected political differences.[15]

Both Schlick and Carnap had been influenced by and sought to define logical positivism versus the neo-Kantianism of

Marburg school, and against Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Logical positivists especially opposed Martin Heidegger's obscure metaphysics, the epitome of what they had rejected through their epistemological doctrines. In the early 1930s, Carnap debated Heidegger over "metaphysical pseudosentences".[17]

Anglosphere

As the movement's first emissary to the

Jewish, were targeted and continued flight throughout the pre-war period. Their philosophy thus became dominant in the English-speaking world.[18]

By the late 1930s, many in the movement had replaced

material objects are not reducible to sensory stimuli but exist as publicly observable entities in the real world. Neurath settled in England, where he died in 1945. Carnap, Reichenbach and Hempel settled permanently in America.[17]

Post-war period

Following the

Thomas Kuhn and Carl Hempel.[3]

Principles

Verification and Confirmation

Main article: Verificationism

Verifiability Criterion of Meaning

According to the

Cognitive meaningfulness was defined variably: possessing truth value; or corresponding to a possible state of affairs; or intelligible or understandable as are scientific statements. Other types of meaning—for instance, emotive, expressive or figurative—were dismissed from further review.[23]

Language, Truth and Logic (1936) presented an extreme version of this principle—the boo/hooray doctrine—whereby all evaluative judgments are merely emotional reactions.[26]

Revisions to the criterion

Logical positivists in the Vienna Circle recognised quickly that the verifiability criterion was too restrictive.[13] Specifically, universal statements were noted to be empirically unverifiable, rendering vital domains of science and reason, such as scientific hypothesis, cognitively meaningless under verificationism. This would pose significant problems for the logical positivist program, absent revisions to its criterion of meaning.[27]

In his 1936 and 1937 papers, Testability and Meaning,

paradox of confirmation.[29]

In his 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer distinguished strong and weak verification. He stipulated that, "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience", but is verifiable in the weak sense "if it is possible for experience to render it probable". He would add that, "no proposition, other than a tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis". Thus, he would conclude that all are open to weak verification.[30]

Analytic-synthetic distinction

Main article:
Analytic-synthetic distinction

In

synthetic: Analytic statements are true by virtue of their own meaning or their own logical form, therefore are tautologies that are true by necessity but uninformative about the world. Synthetic statements, in comparison, are contingent propositions that refer to a state of facts concerning the world.[31][32]

phenomena whereby intuitive truths—including synthetic a priori conceptions of space and time—function as an interpretative filter for an observer's experience of the world.[35] His thesis would serve to rescue Newton's law of universal gravitation from Hume's problem of induction by determining uniformity of nature to be in the category of a priori knowledge.[36]

The Vienna Circle rejected Kant's conception of synthetic a priori knowledge given its incompatibility with the

logicist approach proposed by Gottlob Frege. In effect, Carnap's reconstruction of analyticity expounded Hume's fork, affirming its analytic-synthetic distinction. This would be critically important in rendering the verification principle compatible with mathematics and logic.[39]

Observation-theory distinction

See also: Ramsey sentence

predicate logic and the components of a theory categorised into observation terms and theoretical terms.[40] Observation terms are specified by direct observation and thus assumed to have fixed empirical definitions, whereas theoretical terms refer to the unobservables of a theory, including abstract conceptions such as mathematical formulas. The two categories of primitive terms would be interconnected in meaning via a deductive interpretative framework, referred to as correspondence rules.[41]

Early in his research, Carnap postulated that correspondence rules could be used to define theoretical terms from observation terms, contending that scientific knowledge could be unified by

axioms of a theory. Furthermore, that observation terms could, in some cases, garner meaning from theoretical terms via correspondence rules.[42] Here, definition is said to be 'implicit' in that the axioms serve to exclude those interpretations that falsify the theory. Thus, axioms define theoretical terms indirectly by restricting the set of possible interpretations to those that are true interpretations.[41]

By reconstructing the

Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel and Herbert Feigl.[40]

Logicism

By

symbolic logic. Gottlob Frege began this program of logicism, continuing it with Russell, but eventually lost interest. Russell then continued it with Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica, inspiring some of the more mathematical logical positivists, such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap.[44]

Carnap's early anti-metaphysical works employed Russell's

Carl Hempel, continued support of logicism.[44]

Philosophy of science

The logical positivist movement shed much of its revolutionary zeal following the defeat of Nazism and the decline of rival philosophies that sought radical reform, notably

social sciences.[46]

Scientific explanation

See also: Deductive-nomological model

counterfactual claims.[50] Furthermore, laws must be empirically verifiable in compliance with the verification principle.[48]

The DN model ignores causal mechanisms beyond the principle of constant conjunction ("first event A and then always event B") in accordance with the Humean empiricist postulate that, though sequences of events are observable, the underpinning causal principles are not.[47] Hempel stated that well-formulated natural laws (empirically confirmed regularities) are satisfactory in approximating causal explanation.[48]

Hempel later proposed a probabilistic model of scientific explanation: The inductive-statistical (IS) model. Derivation of statistical laws from other statistical laws would further be designated as the deductive-statistical (DS) model. The DN and IS models are collectively referred to as the "covering law model" or "subsumption theory", the latter referring to the movement's stated goals of "theory reduction".[48][51]

Unity of science

See also: Unity of science

Logical positivists were committed to the vision of a

fundamental physics) which would be synthesised into a singular epistemic entity.[52][48] Key to this concept was the doctrine of theory reduction, according to which the covering law model would be used to interconnect the special sciences and, thereupon, to reduce all laws in the special sciences to fundamental physics.[53]

The movement envisioned a universal scientific language that could express statements with common

analytic and a priori deductive operations (as described in Testability and Meaning, 1936, 1937). A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept.[54][55]

Criticism

In the post-war period, key tenets of logical positivism, including the

Hempel himself became a major critic from within the movement, denouncing the positivist thesis that empirical knowledge is restricted to basic statements, observation statements or protocol statements.[13]

Karl Popper

Karl Popper, a graduate of the University of Vienna, was an outspoken critic of the logical positivist movement from its inception. In Logik der Forschung (1934, published in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery) he attacked verificationism directly, contending that the problem of induction renders it impossible for scientific hypotheses and other universal statements to be verified conclusively. Any attempt to do so, he argued, would commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent, given that verification cannot—in itself—exclude alternative valid explanations for a specific phenomenon or instance of observation.[58] He would later affirm that the content of the verifiability criterion cannot be empirically verified, thus is meaningless by its own proposition and ultimately self-defeating as a principle.[59]

In the same book, Popper proposed falsifiability, which he presented, not as a criterion of cognitive meaning like verificationism (as commonly misunderstood),[60] but as a criterion to distinguish scientific from non-scientific statements, thereby to demarcate the boundaries of science. Popper observed that, though universal statements cannot be verified, they can be falsified, and that the most productive scientific theories were apparently those that carried the greatest 'predictive risks' of being falsified by observation.[61] He would conclude that the scientific method should be a hypothetico-deductive model, wherein scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable (per his criterion), held as provisionally true until proven false by observation, and are corroborated by supporting evidence rather than verified or confirmed.[62]

In rejecting neo-positivist views of cognitive meaningfulness, Popper considered

value systems to be integral to science's quest for truth. At the same time, he disparaged pseudoscience, referring to the confirmation biases that embolden support for unfalsifiable conjectures (notably those in psychology and psychoanalysis) and ad hoc arguments used to entrench predictive theories that have been proven conclusively false.[61]

Willard V. O. Quine

In his influential 1951 paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism, American philosopher and logicist Willard Van Orman Quine challenged the analytic-synthetic distinction. Specifically, Quine examined the concept of analyticity, determining that all attempts to explain the idea reduce ultimately to circular reasoning. He would conclude that, if analyticity is untenable, so too is the neo-positivist proposition to redefine its boundaries.[63] Yet Carnap's reconstruction of analyticity was necessary for logic and mathematics to be deemed meaningful under verificationism. Quine's arguments encompassed numerous criticisms on this topic he had articulated to Carnap since 1933.[64] His work effectively pronounced the verifiability criterion untenable, threatening to uproot the broader logical positivist project.[65]

Norwood Hanson

In 1958,

presuppositions that function as an interpretative framework for the senses.[66] Accordingly, individuals subscribed to different theories might report radically different observations even as they investigate the same phenomena. Hanson's thesis attacked the observation-theory distinction, which draws a dividing line between observational and non-observational (theoretical) language. More broadly, its findings challenged the central-most tenets of empiricism in questioning the infallibility and objectivity of empirical observation.[67]

Thomas Kuhn

fundamental physics—critically undermined confidence in scientific foundationalism.[68] Kuhn proposed in its place a coherentist model of science, whereby scientific progress revolves around cores of established, coherent ideas which periodically undergo abrupt revolutionary changes.[69]

Though foundationalism was often considered a constituent doctrine of logical positivism (and Kuhn's thesis an

epistemological criticism of the movement) such views were simplistic:[70] In the 1930s, Neurath had argued for the adoption of coherentism, famously comparing the progress of science to reconstruction of a boat at sea.[71] Carnap had entertained foundationalism from 1929 to 1930, but he, Hans Hahn and others would later join Neurath in converting to a coherentist philosophy. The conservative wing of the Vienna Circle under Moritz Schlick subscribed to a form of foundationalism, but its principles were defined unconventionally or ambiguously.[72]

In some sense, Kuhn's book unified science, but through historical and social assessment rather than by networking the scientific specialties using epistemological or linguistic models.[73] His ideas were adopted quickly by scholars in non-scientific disciplines, such as the social sciences in which neo-positivists were dominant,[46] ushering academia into postpositivism or postempiricism.[73]

Hilary Putnam

In his critique of the

theory-laden. Accordingly, he remarked that observational reports frequently refer to theoretical terms in practice.[75] He illustrated cases in which observation terms can be applied to entities that Carnap would classify as unobservables. For example, in Newton's corpuscular theory of light, observation concepts can be applied to the consideration of both sub-microscopic and macroscopic objects.[76]

Putnam advocated scientific realism, whereby scientific theory describes a real world existing independently of the senses. He rejected positivism, which he dismissed as a form of metaphysical idealism, in that it precluded any possibility to acquire knowledge of the unobservable aspects of nature. He also spurned instrumentalism, according to which a scientific theory is judged, not by whether it corresponds to reality, but by the extent to which it allows empirical predictions or resolves conceptual problems.[17]

Decline and legacy

In 1967,

Kuhn's historical and social perspectives on the saltatory course of scientific progress.[78]

In a 1976 interview,

Carl Hempel's contributions were vitally important in establishing the subdiscipline of the philosophy of science.[17]

Logical positivism's fall reopened the debate over the metaphysical merit of scientific theory, whether it can offer knowledge of the world beyond human experience (scientific realism) or whether it is simply an instrument to predict human experience (instrumentalism).[81][82] Philosophers increasingly critiqued the movement's doctrine and history, often misrepresenting it without thorough examination,[83] sometimes reducing it to oversimplifications and stereotypes, such as its association with foundationalism.[84]

See also

  • Definitions of philosophy – Proposed definitions of philosophy
  • Anti-realism – Truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability, not its correspondence to an external reality
  • Sociological positivism
     – Empiricist philosophical theory
  • Academic skepticism – Skeptical period of ancient Academy
  • The Structure of Science – 1961 book by Ernest Nagel
  • Raven paradox – Paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement
  • Unobservable – Entity not directly observable by humans

People

  • Ernst Mach – Austrian physicist, philosopher and university educator (1838–1916)
  • Gottlob Frege – German philosopher, logician, and mathematician (1848–1925)
  • Friedrich Waismann – Austrian mathematician, physicist and philosopher (1896–1959)
  • Gustav Bergmann – Austrian-born American philosopher (1906-1987)
  • Herbert Feigl – Austrian-American philosopher
  • Kurt Grelling – German logician and philosopher (1886–1942)
  • R. B. Braithwaite – English philosopher and ethicist (1900–1990)

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Further reading

  • Achinstein, Peter; Barker, Stephen F. (1969). The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
  • Bergmann, Gustav (1954). The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. New York: Longmans Green.
  • Cirera, Ramon (1994). Carnap and the Vienna Circle: Empiricism and Logical Syntax. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.
  • Creath, Richard. "Logical Empiricism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Gadol, Eugene T. (1982). Rationality and Science: A Memorial Volume for Moritz Schlick in Celebration of the Centennial of his Birth. Wien: Springer.
  • Giere, Ronald N.; Richardson, Alan W. (1997). Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Hájek, Alan. "Interpretations of Probability". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Holt, Jim (2017). "Positive Thinking". The New York Review of Books. 64 (20): 74–76.
  • Jangam, R. T. (1970). Logical Positivism and Politics. Delhi: Sterling Publishers.
  • Janik, Allan; Toulmin, Stephen (1973). Wittgenstein's Vienna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  • Kraft, Victor (1953). The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-positivism, a Chapter in the History of Recent Philosophy. New York: Greenwood Press.
  • McGuinness, Brian (1979). Joachim Schulte; Brian McGuinness (eds.). Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.
  • Milkov, Nikolay, ed. (2015). Die Berliner Gruppe. Texte zum Logischen Empirismus von Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling, Carl G. Hempel, Alexander Herzberg, Kurt Lewin, Paul Oppenheim und Hans Reichenbach. Hamburg: Meiner.
  • Mises von, Richard (1951). Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Murzi, Mauro (2007). "Logical Positivism". In Tom Flynn (ed.). The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Prometheus Books.
  • Parrini, Paolo (1983). Empirismo logico e convenzionalismo: saggio di storia della filosofia della scienza. Milano: F. Angeli.
  • Parrini, Paolo; Salmon, Wesley C.; Salmon, Merrilee H., eds. (2003). Logical Empiricism – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Passmore, John (1967). "Logical Positivism". In Paul Edwards (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1st ed.). New York: Macmillan.
  • Reisch, George (2005). How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Rescher, Nicholas (1985). The Heritage of Logical Positivism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
  • Alan Richardson; Thomas Uebel, eds. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Logical Positivism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Ryckman, Thomas A. "Early Philosophical Interpretations of General Relativity". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Salmon, Wesley; Wolters, Gereon, eds. (1994). Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21–24 May 1991. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra, ed. (1996). The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: From 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York: Garland Publishing.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra, ed. (1996). Logical Empiricism and the Special Sciences: Reichenbach, Feigl, and Nagel. New York: Garland Publishing.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra, ed. (1996). Decline and Obsolescence of Logical Empiricism: Carnap vs. Quine and the Critics. New York: Garland Publishing.
  • Sarkar, Sahotra, ed. (1996). The Legacy of the Vienna Circle: Modern Reappraisals. New York: Garland Publishing.
  • Spohn, Wolfgang, ed. (1991). Erkenntnis Orientated: A Centennial Volume for Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Stadler, Friedrich (2015). The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism (2nd ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.
  • Stadler, Friedrich, ed. (2003). The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism. Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Werkmeister, William (May 1937). "Seven Theses of Logical Positivism Critically Examined". The Philosophical Review. 46 (3): 276–297.
    JSTOR 2181086
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Articles by logical positivists

Articles on logical positivism