Positivism,
which is sometimes called strong Empiricism or verificationism by
supporters, holds that statements which can be scientifically verified
are objective truth, and that all else is subjective opinion. For
Positivists, only science, with the aid of logic and mathematics, can
prove statements exclusively true or false, and all other claims of
truth, those made in religion, history, art, politics, can be considered
mere opinion, unverified superstition, or meaningless nonsense. This
position was originally laid out in France in the 1800s by Comte and
Saint-Simon. In the early 1900s, this developed in Britain into the
Logical Positivism of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein, the
tradition which dominated philosophy in Britain and America until the
1960s.
WWI
and the early 1900s was a dynamic time for Europe. It was a brutal war
filled to the brim with new forms of technology, including machine
guns, bomber planes, motorized troop transport, chemical weapons, and
broadcast propaganda. Just as Rationalism and Empiricism split on the
scientific advancement of the European Enlightenment of the 1600s and
1700s, the Existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre and the Logical
Positivism of Frege and Russell split on the negative reaction to the
technological problems of World War I and the Great Depression in the
early 1900s. While Existentialists and the Dada artists did not reject
science, but rather came to view rationality and technology with
suspicion, the Logical Positivists chose to believe in reason and logic,
the essence of science, which they believed could lead humanity away
from cruelty and domination. Looking at humanity destroying itself with
evolved forms of technology, one could choose whether to blame the
passionate assertion of desire or the dispassionate calculation of
reason. One could blame reason for being distant from passion and
fulfillment, much as Schopenhauer viewed individuation and Sartre viewed
the social role of a waiter. On the other hand, one could blame
passion for being irrational, much as the Logical Positivists who turned
to science, logic and verificationism. These later thinkers hoped to
provide a universal language for scientific facts that humanity could
use to be logical and rational.
As
mentioned with German pessimism, after WWII there was a new surge of
interest in German Philosophy in Britain and America, as well as in
France, Japan and many other places around the world. Positivism
increasingly came under attack by opponents and critics, who sometimes
labeled it ‘scientism’, a negative term coined by Huston Smith, the
famed scholar of world religion and a friend of Aldous Huxley in the
fifties and sixties. In the next weeks, covering Utilitarianism,
Pragmatism, and Philosophy of Science, we will be investigating the
opposition between the dogmatic position of Positivism and its many
skeptical critics. In the interest of full disclosure, I myself was
frustrated with Positivism and Analytic philosophy as a Berkeley
undergrad, experiencing this firsthand in John Searle’s Philosophy of
Mind class, and as I progressed and developed I came to a better
understanding of the history of philosophy and why I agree more with the
opponents of Positivism than I do with John Searle.
Today,
we will first return to the earliest of Positivists, Auguste Comte.
Then we will examine the development of Logical Positivism in the work
of Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein. Finally, we will
consider the Vienna Circle, later Wittgenstein’s reactions against the
Circle and his own earlier work, and post 1960s Positivists who have
been influenced by later Wittgenstein and criticisms of Logical
Positivism.
Auguste Comte
(1798 - 1857 CE) is known as one of the first philosophers of science,
sociologists, and users of the term ‘Positivism’ which he also called
‘Positive Philosophy’. He is also credited with coining the term
‘altruism’ (altruisme in French, from ‘autri’, ‘other’), selfless
behavior as opposed to selfish behavior. Comte was born just as
Napoleon was conquering France in the wake of the French Revolution. He
became a student of and then private secretary to Saint-Simon, who had
been active during the French Revolution and attempted to use his
personal wealth to create a scientific socialist society. This
unfortunately did not work out, and Saint-Simon was imprisoned by
Robespierre during the Reign of Terror for using his wealth to influence
the revolution. Comte later broke from Saint-Simon, and became the
close friend of John Stuart Mill, founder of Utilitarianism (which we
will study next week).
Comte
published A General View of Positivism in 1848, just as the German
peasant uprisings were being crushed, turning the Germans towards the
pessimism of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Comte was concerned, like
Saint-Simon, with salvaging the Rationalism of the French Revolution in
the wake of its brutal infighting and deterioration. In this work,
Comte argued that all true knowledge is scientific, and that science
would eventually be unified by a common content and method, ironing out
all contradiction and variance. Theory is to be based on the
observation of facts, and any theory that is not thus grounded is
superstitious metaphysics that cannot be legitimately authoritative.
Comte
argued, as had Hegel, that history had progressed to his own position
in three stages. While for Hegel, these were Being, Essence and
Concept, for Comte history had transitioned from the theological period
of medieval Neoplatonism to the metaphysical period of Descartes and
Kant, and then finally to the positive period of his own time. Like
Heidegger, Comte hailed the end of metaphysics as the birth of authentic
understanding, though the two differed entirely on the issue of
objectivity and truth.
Comte
believed that science was in the final process of completing itself
through the course of history, and that it had began with the ideal
certainty of mathematics and would end with the most complex and
difficult science, Sociology, which Comte had originally called ‘Social
Physics’. Advancements in Biology of his day convinced him that just as
Physics had succeeded beyond mathematics in concreteness and
complexity, and as Biology had in turn beyond Physics, Sociology would
succeed beyond Biology, giving humanity a positive scientific
understanding of society, just as Saint-Simon had originally intended
via socialism. Just as philosophy had been known as “Queen of the
Sciences” in the medieval age of Europe, Sociology would become the
“Queen Science”, the crown on the head of that which was rooted in
mathematics. Needless to say, Sociology is today still considered a
‘soft’ social science, not ‘hard’ like mathematics and Physics, so the
firm grounding Comte predicted has not come to pass.
Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970 CE) was born into one of the most prominent aristocratic
families of Britain, and retained the title ‘Lord’ even when arrested
for demonstrating as a pacifist and socialist against the first World
War. Russell distinguished his own Logical Empiricism from that of the
earlier British Empiricists (Locke, Hume and Berkeley), arguing that
Empiricism had learned to analyse using the method of mathematics and
logic and thus arrive at certainty. Interestingly, this means that
Russell saw Empiricism as having become the new true Rationalism, using
deduction to verify induction. Russell argued against skepticism,
Hegelianism and instrumentalism (another name for Utilitarianism, the
philosophy of Mill which we will cover next week).
As
a youth, Russell feared going mad like his uncle, and believed that
reason alone would save the world and himself from madness. He found in
Euclid’s geometric proofs as a boy what his Grandmother had hoped to
give him with strict Christian faith, “delicious” absolute certainty.
Later, when he discovered that Euclid relied on axioms, principles that
he had not proven but assumed to be true, Russell was deeply
disappointed, but later said that this was a defining moment of his
life. He would attempt to completely ground mathematics in deduction
from certainty, which for many years he believed the truth table Logic
of his young associate Wittgenstein would eventually do.
Russell
found that mathematicians were all in agreement, afraid to contradict
each other but afraid also to ask the deeper philosophical questions
about the certainty of mathematics, questions that had to be asked to
give mathematics and thus science a firm grounding. Then, when he
turned to philosophy to ask the deeper questions, Russell found that the
philosophers were all in disagreement, contradicting each other at
every turn. Russell hated contradiction, unlike Hegel whom Russell
despised. Russell took a class on Hegel with G. E. Moore, and both were
utterly confused and angered by the needless obscurity and abstraction.
Russell believed that philosophy needed a Euclid, and he would be that
Euclid. After discovering the work of Leibniz and Boole, Russell
dedicated himself to being a logician.
In
Russell’s text On Induction, which I gave you in your reader, he argues
that we know with certainty that the self and sense data exist. Recall
that Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar
position, though Descartes was certain of a good and just God whereas
Russell was an atheist who believed in the positive truth of science,
not religion. Both believed in the certainty and rationality of
mathematics. Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than
the obvious and immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions
into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder
again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we
want to know the relationship between the two.
Russell
admits that this creates a problem. If we only know general principles
by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes
the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied
with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are
always true in order to have knowledge. Like Descartes, Russell argues
that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or
otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions.
We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our
induction sometimes leads us to certain truth, and so, Russell argues,
we must found our understandings in the principle of the uniformity of
nature, the object of all science. Unfortunately for Russell, he was
writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of
nature were the dominant model of science and physics. Einstein’s work
did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and
toward use of the word “theory” to describe proposed conceptions of the
regularities of nature, humanity and the universe.
In
another text, The Empiricist Answer to Skepticism, Russell calls out
Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of
independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by their methods.
Russell says that we can “whittle away” at our theories to get to the
pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be.
Wittgenstein later used the metaphor of bedrock, the level at which
“our spade is turned” and we can do no more. Russell has faith in a
‘minimal theory’, and though he concedes to the Hegelians and skeptics
that there is always some uncertainty in truth, some room for error, he
argues that some data has “independent credibility”, seemingly known in
itself. Russell argues that some things must be more than opinion, as
opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts
itself or other things, and that we should give the “greatest weight”
(note the use of metaphor and analogy, again) to that which is most
regular and most certain, and in this way form our principles and
propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the
skeptic, much like Descartes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951 CE) was influenced as a youth by Schopenhauer, much like
Nietzsche, though Wittgenstein initially took this in a Kantian
noncontradictory way. Nietzsche, in his younger work, focused on the
contradictory nature of the ancient Greeks, both Apollonian and
Dionysian. To use Hegel’s lens of dogmatism and skepticism,
Wittgenstein, like the Positivist philosophers before him and the
Analytic philosophers to follow, took Schopenhauer’s Kantianism in a
dogmatic (Nietzsche would say, Apollonian) way, while Nietzsche, like
the pessimistic philosophers before him and the Existential philosophers
to follow, took Schopenhauer in a skeptical, Dionysian way.
Wittgenstein
had two periods of this thinking, the early and late, both of which are
central to Positivism and Analytic philosophy. His early work is found
in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the only book published in his
lifetime. In this book, Wittgenstein presented the world with his truth
table method of logic, which is still taught today in logic classes,
often completely replacing Aristotle. This early work was foundational
for Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle, dominating Analytic
thought until the 1960s. Wittgenstein’s later work is found in his many
notebooks published under various titles after his death, the most
important being his Philosophical Investigations. His later work,
critical of his earlier work, was important for many Positivists and
Post-positivists after the 1960s. In an end of the century poll in 2000
CE, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list
the five most important books that influenced their own work. When the
results were tallied, the Philosophical Investigations was first, and
the Tractatus was fourth. The Philosophical Investigations was cited
far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more
ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas
of study than any other book.
Wittgenstein’s Father
made a fortune in steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his
mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at
the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the
time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental
outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Wittgenstein attended
elementary school with Adolf Hitler. Wittgenstein was two days younger
than Hitler, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held
back a grade Wittgenstein was two years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated
the school and their lessons.
Wittgenstein
began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an
interest in flight, but after failing in his attempt to build a better
propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of
mathematics, becoming entranced with the work of Russell in Britain and
Frege in Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, but Frege did not
understand his questions and advised him to see Russell in Britain,
which he did in 1911. He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at
Trinity College, and impressed him with his intense and brilliant
arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going
to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining
problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics
had left open. Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved
in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated
trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
As
mentioned, Russell believed that sense data and empirical observations
could be taken as certain facts, but Wittgenstein insisted that only
Logic could be known with certainty, not affairs of the world. In one
famous incident, as Russell was getting to know Wittgenstein through
intense conversation and debate in Russell’s room, Russell asked
Wittgenstein if he at least accepted that the statement, “There are no
rhinoceroses in this room” is certain beyond doubt. In response,
Wittgenstein lept out of his chair and began going about the room
looking under furniture and opening drawers. He was attempting to show
Russell that statements about the world must be continuously justified
through investigation and experience, not taken as simple matters of
certain fact.
Wittgenstein,
an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at
Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened
to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could
finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally
accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with
Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell
encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the
purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at
Cambridge. When WWI broke out, Wittgenstein served for Austria as he
was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s
death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle
and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent.
He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Russell
intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and
introduction for it. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized
Russell had greatly misunderstood his work. Believing that his
Tractatus had solved all the problems of Logic, Wittgenstein left
Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria.
He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers
but also to his rich family saying, “They won’t be corrupted by it”. He
left the school after a short while, became a gardener’s assistant, and
then his sister had him design her a house.
While
finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle,
Positivists who hoped that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus could give a solid
foundation for science as well as Logic. Realizing that the Vienna
Circle had misunderstood his work much like Russell, Wittgenstein became
increasingly disgusted. He began to realize that there were
fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into
intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning
his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental
poet, out loud until they left. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein
thought the Logical Positivists misunderstood his Tractatus.
In
his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully articulated the
complete system of Logic. Like Kant and Schopenhauer, early
Wittgenstein saw Logic as a perfect crystal tool of analysis through
which we view life, a messy chaotic ocean, like having the perfect tool
for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with the Vienna
Circle he started to change his thinking around and continued to write
in his notebooks until he died. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw
logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games
that are lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete
definition. He no longer believed that Logic could provide a certain
foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that
contradictions are necessarily false, or that they disprove a system.
In
1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and
teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was
greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the author of the Tractatus,
the work he now thought was wrong. The famous economist Keynes wrote
to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’.
Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber and work
with his hands. When he was told that the Soviets would put him to
work as a philosophy professor in Moscow or elsewhere, as Communism,
like the Socialism of Saint-Simon, believes in planning what is best for
the people, he defected back to Britain.
Why
was Wittgenstein’s early work so popular, and why did he later reject
it? Even though Tractatus Logico Philosophicus was obscure in points,
even mystical, a hated obscurist enemy of positivism, his form of Truth
Table logic allowed for statements to be evaluated as exclusively true
or false in relation to other statements. Wittgenstein’s genius was to
see that even if the situation could not be predicted or ensured with
absolute certainty, the relationship between statements operates
logically.
Recall
that Hegel started with the stage of sense certainty, and argued that
when we write down truths such as “It is now nighttime”, we find that
later these truths have “gone stale”, as this statement is no longer
true the next morning. Wittgenstein argued, very much as Aristotle had
in ancient Athens, that statements are true at certain times, and false
at others, but they cannot be both true and false at the same time.
Thus, if “I am standing” is true now, then “I am not standing” is
necessarily false. Similarly, if “Whatever is a circle is not a square”
is true, and “I am a circle” is true, then “I am a square” is
necessarily false. By focusing on the logical operations of ‘and’,
‘or’, and ‘if-then’ in relation to each other, Wittgenstein believed
that he had given Logic its true foundations, even if it could not
verify the certainty of any given fact or situation. When it comes to
facts in the world everything is contingent on something else and is
neither simply necessary nor simply impossible.
Logic
is the necessary and impossible bookends, the frame with which we
interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the
necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat
impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure determined logic and
the unpredictable world. Logic is the language out of which we build
models of the world, and thus our experience of the world is our model.
As Wittgenstein famously said in the opening of his Tractatus, “The
world consists of facts, not of things”. Russell and the Vienna Circle
wanted Wittgenstein to ground mathematics and science as objectively
certain in themselves, but Wittgenstein was only concerned with the
framework of Logic, our modeling language, in the head, not the cultures
of mathematics or science.
As
mentioned last week, the later work of Wittgenstein is strangely
Heideggerian. Just as he argued against the Logical Positivists that
there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no
individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in Logic, can have a single
or necessary meaning. He came to see that he had attempted to provide
singular meanings for things that merely have common uses. Thus, there
is no more a single necessary meaning of ‘and’ or ‘true’ in the head
than there is a single correct scientific description or picture of the
world. He came to argue that ‘and’ and ‘or’ are not exclusively in the
head, but real things involved in the irreducibly complex games we play
in the world. He called these situations ‘language games’ and ‘forms of
life’. Wittgenstein came to argue that any system of logic, like his
truth tables, is a tool that is a thing in the world like any other.
Because logic is a tool, it does not need to be perfectly defined or
entirely consistent any more than an apple needs to be perfectly defined
or entirely consistent. What is important is that logic and the world
are relatively consistent such that we can use and describe things.
There
is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that
illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from
Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in
the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be
published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this
time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating
Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world,
even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single
essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. Wittgenstein
attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation for boiling
everything down to sex.
Wittgenstein
proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human
being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the
human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is
a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water
in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have
the essence of the person. Would it be correct to say that humans are
essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a
human is essentially carbon or water, nor would we say ashy or wet,
because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a
single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves
explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people
down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the complex situation and can
no longer investigate how they work. In the same way, a person is not
merely their DNA. While carbon, water and DNA have very important, even
necessary roles to play in any person, they are not exclusively the
essence or meaning of the complex that is a human individual.
In
the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in
the world nor Logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or
necessary structure. Facts and Logic are not true in themselves, but
true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex.
Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to
avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down
to a single element like Freud tried to boil human relations, meaning
and the mind down to sex or Wittgenstein himself had tried to boil logic
down to its simple structure.
The
task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely
explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully
defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science
is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to do
describing and re-describing things. Consider whether we fully
understand apples, or whether we ever need to entirely understand them
in order to continue to understand them and use them a great deal.
Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if
thinking is merely a possible description of things, philosophy and
logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing
and re-describing the ways that we describe things. Much insight can be
gained even if no subject is entirely explained or exhausted.
In
his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues for a middle way
between two extreme positions, between the position of scientific
positivism (objective truth is facts in the world) and the position of
psychological skepticism (subjective truth is meanings in the mind). He
presents each position, and then argues against both. He shows us that
taking either position to extremes would be understandable given
particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the
ways in which we think and act. In his earlier thought, the world and
the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and
subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work
together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either
the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth
without resulting in absurdities.
The
clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into
thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either
exclusively in the head or exclusively in the world, but we gain much
more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop
looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place rather than
the other. Games and rules gather people together, but individuals can
also variously interpret rules and meanings. ‘Rules can always be
variously interpreted’ is a central idea of the Philosophical
Investigations. Wittgenstein writes, “It is like locking a man in a
room but leaving the window open”. Note the similarity to Heidegger’s
conception of authenticity, which seeks ground neither in the objective
nor subjective.
Consider
Wittgenstein’s ‘child at the blackboard’. It is always possible for a
child to misunderstand rules and demonstrate this misunderstanding by
making mistakes, even after you show the child and explain. Let us say
that you then write a new ‘inner’ set of rules to further explain the
rules when the child fails. What if the child does not understand
those? Is there a bedrock set of rules that the child can not possibly
misunderstand? If the child can misunderstand rules, then no set of
rules within rules within rules is ever perfectly airtight. We have an
infinite regress unless we can find a set of rules that can never be
misinterpreted. This is similar to the dual paradox of Sextus Empiricus
the ancient Greek Pyrrhonian skeptic: Things can either be known in
themselves, presenting us with the problem of circularity, or known in
another thing, presenting us with the problem of infinite regress. The
practice of mathematics on a blackboard is not grounded in the symbols,
nor in our concepts, nor in the sets of things in the world, but in the
culture of its use, in the culture of teaching children the operations
on the blackboard, surrounded by a culture that uses this. This is both
circular and regressive, a self-grounding that isn’t entirely grounded
like Heidegger’s notion of authenticity. It turns out that there are no
inner workings to mathematics. Mathematics works as it does openly, on
the board in front of one’s face. Wittgenstein writes that we must
resist the urge of the “secret cellar”, the urge to “whittle away”, as
Russell had said, until we find the certain element.
When
we try to explain mathematics, as Frege had tried to do with set
theory, Russell had tried to do with his theory of types, and
Wittgenstein had tried to do with his truth tables, mathematics is not
being simplified, being stripped down to its core, at all. It is the
opposite: we are making it more complex as we try to simplify and
explain it. The rules are not being discovered in the thing, but being
added to the thing. When we explain things, we are not whittling away
the unnecessary but adding our descriptions to it. In the same way,
when we do science to explain apples or human beings, we are adding our
descriptions and the situations of our descriptions, not uncovering the
simple truth of the thing. The simple truth of a thing is the simple
thing itself. The simplest truth of an apple is the single apple
itself, not any description of it (a very Zen-like observation). An
explanation of where apples come from is very useful, but it puts the
apple in a complex with many other things (such as trees, farms, stores,
trucks). There are no final explanations, only complex descriptions.
Any explanation is a partial human description, which can then itself
be described and explained. The task of philosophy, science and
mathematics is not to reduce things to simple truth, but to generate
more meaning and situations. Wittgenstein writes, ”What we do is to
bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”. It is
just this sort of statement that later post-Logical Positivists
appreciate.
The Vienna Circle, Ayer & Moore
Two
groups of Logical Positivists, the Berlin Circle of Hans Reichenbach
and the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick, based their pursuit of
Positivism in Wittgenstein’s early work, but by the time they met him he
had moved on to his later thinking. The Vienna Circle is the more
famous of the two, their philosophy spelled out in a 1929 pamphlet by
Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. What is verifiable through
experience is what is meaningful, and this is analysed by science using
Logic. Science must be unified, and metaphysics eliminated. In the
late 1930s, as the Nazis annexed Austria, the Vienna Circle fled to
England and America, much like the Frankfurt Circle, mentioned last week
with Heidegger, fled from Germany to America.
A.
J. Ayer, a young British attendant at meetings of the Vienna Circle,
introduced their work to an English speaking audience. He proposed
“weak” verificationism versus the “strong verificationism” of Logical
Positivism to save Positivism from its critics. According to Ayer,
Logical Positivism had been too excessive in its claim to establish
conclusions. While “strong” Positivism asserts absolutely established
conclusions, the “weak” Positivism of Ayer merely asserts relatively
probable conclusions. For Ayer, all truth other than tautologies
(unmarried men are bachelors, or a square is a shape with four equal
sides set at equal right angles) are hypotheses.
Notice
the Kantian divide between the tautological, which can be known a
priori, before experience, and the verifiable, which can only be known a
posteriori, after experience. Like Kant, Positivism continued to
adhere to the a priori status of the principle of noncontradiction.
However, unlike Kant, Positivists tended to reject the possibility of
synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant’s desired product of his Critique of
Pure Reason. While Kant was hoping to save metaphysics and establish it
as a legitimate science, Positivists such as Ayer were less
Rationalists and more Empiricists, seeing philosophy as a method of
clarification that allowed the sciences to acquire more knowledge
through experience. Ayer, who was influenced by Hume, returned to a
more skeptical Empiricist view of science, strangely compatible with
ancient Indian, Greek and Chinese skepticism, as well as the later work
of Wittgenstein.
Logical
Positivists took sides. Some agreed with Ayer, while others saw this
as a betrayal of logic and collapse into pragmatism and skepticism.
Members of the original Vienna Circle found themselves taking sides
against each other, polarizing into a ‘left’ and ‘right’ much like the
French Revolution (which Hegel would have appreciated). On the
progressive ‘left’ were Carnap, Hahn and Neurath, who argued that a
weaker form of verification was necessary, that verificationism would
have to be “liberalized”, and that Logic should be extended to the
problems of society. On the conservative ‘right’ were Schlick and
Waismann, who opposed any softening or liberalizing of verificationism
and believed that Logic was to be confined to mathematics and
philosophy..
In
the period after WWII, the fifties and sixties, Logical Positivism was
increasingly attacked by a new wave of Analytic philosophers,
Pragmatists and philosophers of science. We will cover the Pragmatists
along with the Utilitarians next week, and the philosophers of science
the following week. There were other Analytic philosophers who remained
loyal to Positivism but attacked the assumptions of the original
Logical Positivists, many of whom were influenced by the later work of
Wittgenstein. Much of this became known as the Common Language
Movement. While Positivism had turned from history and the social to
focus on the logical and mathematical, many Analytic philosophers turned
to what can be argued given common sense and expression in language.
While Analytic philosophy, which can still be identified with
Positivism, continued to focus on the clear and thorough, there was no
longer a general consensus on the unity or cohesion of logic or science.
They kept the method and style, but bid farewell to the goal which had
failed to materialize.
Consider
G. E. Moore, a friend and colleague of Russell, was concerned with what
practical things in experience can be considered certain. Wittgenstein
mentions Moore holding up both his hands, saying, “I can be certain of
at least two facts, and here they are”. Wittgenstein replied that Moore
was simply giving an example in which it is very difficult, but not
impossible, to disagree with him. There is another illustrative story
of Moore’s certainty that took place in Berkeley in 1941, as Moore was
giving a lecture in Wheeler Hall on certainty. Moore pointed to the
ceiling, saying that we can know many things with certainty, such that
the light coming through the glass panes is from the Sun. Most of the
audience, familiar with Wheeler Hall’s multiple stories, was aware that
the lighting was artificial. When this was brought to his attention
during the question period following the lecture, Moore simply blurted
out, “Oh dear me” as his only response. I consider this an appropriate
conclusion to our consideration of Positivism.
