I am just beginning to look into logical positivism and its origins and I had a couple of questions, as this stuff is a bit difficult for me to sift through.
Am I correct in asserting that logical positivism arose as an attempt to extend positivism from the realm of science into philosophy, in an effort to quash metaphysics? Or is this too simplistic of an explanation?
Also, it seems that ethics becomes a meaningless subject given a logical positivist paradigm. How, then, did the logical positivists characterize ethics? Did they simply view it as pointless? Did it even have a place in philosophical discussion?
Positivism has always been a philosophical doctrine. Its central claim is that no truth can be known except by the process of empirical verification/falsification. Of course, this has implications for science, since it is the only the method of ascertaining truth. However, at its core, positivism is a philosophical system. Whatever claims positivists make about metaphysics will have to fit within the verification/falsification paradigm.
The positivists were ethical non-cognitivist anti-realists. They didn’t think that ethical claims were the sort of thing that could be empirically established as true or false, so they discarded the topic altogether.
Thanks for defining positivism. As a newer poster to the forum, I hear people throwing around the word ‘positivist’ all the time, and I didn’t know what it meant.
The early logical positivists (Vienna circle), Carnap and such, adhered to the principle of verification and reductionism, that is, they believed that you could translate out all statements into statements about sense data, or immediate observable data. This is clearly problematic once one considers broad general statements or inter-temporal statements. For example, the battle at Stalingrad cannot be reduced to immediate sense/observable data. Verification states that statements are only “cognitively meaningful,” that is, they entirely rejected metaphysics and ethics. Here’s Carnap on metaphysics:
Essentially, positivism was one of the early attacks on truth with a capital-T. For the positivists, truth only exists within certain frameworks; the physicist, for example, cares little about first principles, and works within his framework in order to discover truth (lower-case t). They also use weird meta-languages in order to avoid the problems of language.
Falsificationism is not really logical positivism, but rather a reaction to the failure of positivism and the verification method. Popper did not flatly reject metaphysics, as I understand it, but rather separated metaphysical statements from “scientific statements” (the latter can be falsified).
Positivism, and all 20th century philosophy, from what I can tell, is merely a reaction to religion. The enlightenment tried to rationalize all phenomena without appealing to God, and when they failed, they began to attack truth and reality itself. Philosophy is dead–meaningless garbage.
No, falsificationism is definitely a branch of positivism; one that is better than verificationism by a damn sight. However, the disagreement between the two branches is with regard to methodology, not principle. They both accepted the idea that the justification for knowledge was always empirical. Karl Popper just thought that truth could only be approached asymptotically by the elimination of false hypothesis through scientific testing. I an unaware of any difference between Karl Popper and the other positivists with regard to their opinion of metaphysics.
An astute observation.
That’s quite a generalization. Perhaps even a self defeating one, unless you claim to use something other than good philosophy to refute bad philosophy.
I don’t really see how it’s better. If we ignore all of the self-evident truths which can’t be falsified we still come across a major problem with the falsification method, namely, why is one belief better than another belief? Suppose we have two statements/theories, both of which are falsifiable, but neither have been falsified yet; which one do we choose? Does it really make a difference? How am I to choose between Hyman Minsky’s trade cycle framework, for example, and the Austrian framework without employing deductive reasoning?
Truth, by definition, cannot be falsified. Science then, if we are to accept Popper’s philosophy, investigates real world phenomena, but only reaches incorrect conclusions (since finding truth would mean that you were testing an unfalsifiable proposition, which, according to Popper, is unscientific). It forces us to choose between either truth or science. If truth exists, then science is not valid, and if science is valid, then truth does not exist; what then is the purpose of science?
You’re right, both views are false. But the falsificationists tend to be much more modest and therefore more tolerable.
The positivists would say that you can’t chose between the two views unless there is sufficient empirical justification.
I don’t think the positivists would agree that truth is unfalsifiable. They would say that it’s theoretically possible to falsify any empirical proposition, but in matter of fact, this cannot be done to true propositions.
No, he was. Hoppe talks about this every year at Mises U in his lecture on praxeology. I suppose it depends on how you define “positivism;” Karl Popper was certainly deeply critical of many of the other positivists, but this doesn’t mean that he wasn’t one of them himself.
You’re right, it depends how you define the term positivism. If you define it like everybody else, you’ll probably end up concluding that Popper is not a positivist. And that’s why Hoppe uses the word positivist to describe Popper, because he simply sees the term as a pejorative to insult those he doesn’t like. Much how Gary Becker and Milton Friedman are “intellectual criminals” who are “worse than the communists”.
A definition is not better or worse, it just exists. You will have to swallow it.
Right, my definition is better because it’s the same as the definition used by most other people. On the contrary, Hoppe’s definition of a positivist as “somebody with whom I disagree” is a little unorthodox, and if one were to use it the response would most likely be a lot of raised eyebrows. You know, as if people were looking at you like some sort of a crank.
The purpose of the thread was to flesh out the differences between positivism and logical positivism. I thank those that are contributing, but it seems to me, as someone sitting back and listening to the back and forth, that there may be a conflation of these terms going on. Is this possible? Is it possible when Hoppe says “positivism” he is referring, in fact, to “logical positivism?” I don’t know - just bringing this up as a possibility. I’ll read his paper on it, but I do seem to recall that in one of his lectures on praxeology he was talking about logical positivism but simply shortened it to positivism. I could be wrong, though.
‘Positivism’ is a more general term than ‘logical positivism’. There are legal positivists, political positivists, etc. Logical positivism is simply the philosophy (or epistemology more accurately) that those in the positivist school subscribe to.
Well, then I define this statement as being wrong. Definitions can be better or worse, because they can be true or false. Either Karl Popper classifies as a positivist, or he does not. Under what definition does he classify as a non-positivist? I would like to know. (seriously)
Karl Popper was a well-known critic of logical positivism, who published the book Logik der Forschung in 1934 (translated by himself as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published 1959). In it he argued that the positivists’ criterion of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and should be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability. Popper thought that falsifiability was a better criterion because it did not invite the philosophical problems inherent in verifying an induction, and it allowed statements from the physical sciences which seemed scientific but which did not meet the verification criterion.
Popper’s concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from meaningless statements, but distinguishing scientific from metaphysical statements. Unlike the positivists, he did not hold that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; he also held that a statement which was “metaphysical” and unfalsifiable in one century (like the ancient Greek philosophy aboutatoms) could, in another century, be developed into falsifiable theories that have the metaphysical views as a consequence, and thus become scientific.
Popper denied that science need rely on inductive reasoning, or that inductive reasoning actually exists, although most philosophers think it obvious that science does rely on it
See, now anybody who tries to label Popper as a positivist is using a definition that is clearly somewhere unorthodox.
Do you plan to try to substantiate that?
Nope, I don’t. I don’t feel like going through Hoppe’s angry rhetoric to try and tease out his definition of positivism. Anybody who finds this problematic should discount the value of my post accordingly. But they should also keep in mind that this is the guy who calls free market economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker “worse than the communists” and “intellectual criminals”.
The man has too radical views for your taste. Yet somehow this is suppose to discredit his theoretical work. Friedman’s work is also discredited by the same type of rhetoric.