Chapter 6: Logical Positivism Flashcards
Logical postivism
- Empiricist, positivist and logical.
- Empiricist due the use of experience and senses. Knowledge only from the experiences.
- Positivists because science is the route to knowledge.
- Logical because the application of the method of logical analysis. Logical positivists tried to analyse the scientific language by using logic.
- The aim of scientific effort is to reach the goal, unified science, by applying logical analysis to empirical material.
New job description for philosophers
- Philosophy is not about providing insights about the world - we have science for that.
- Logical analysis and rational reconstruction of scientific language.
- Philosophy in the service of science.
The Late-Enlightenment / The Vienna Circle (Weiner Kreis)
- 1920s ‘till 1930s.
- Only on invite of Schlick.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein was their God.
- The mission is the development of a scientific worldview, “removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia” and demarcation (an act of creating a boundary around a place of thing) between meaningful and meaningless propositions.
Linguistic turn
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Focus on language instead of vague judgements in the mind.
Meaningful statements
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Meaningful statements fall into two categories: the formal and the factual.
The formal meaningful statement
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Logical and mathematical statements. Entirely dependent on their own formal structure and the meaning of terms used in them: tautologies. They give us no new information, you do not have to check it in the world, it is already present in the word/definition (analytic a priori)
E.g. a triangle has three sides.
The factual meaningful statement
- Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- Factual and mathematical statements. They can only be established through sensory experiences, check in the world if it is true or not, they have to provide a picture of reality [picture theory] (synthetic a posteriori).
Picture Theory (sachsverhalte)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Basic, elementary statements are “pictures of reality”. They mirror atomic facts (sachsverhalte). They are meaningful, because they provide a picture of what actually happened in the real world.
Verification
A sentence is meaningful when you know how to establish whether it is true or not, when you know how to verify it.
Inspired by Wittgenstein picture theory.
Logical positivism: protocol statements
Observational statements that provide science with its empirical basis. But what does that empirical basis consists in? Phenomenalism & physicalism.
Phenomenalism
- Logical positivism: protocol statements.
- proposes that observation or protocol sentences refer directly to experience (or sense-data) and are thus absolutely certain. These sentences constitute the given, naked and uninterpreted facts about which no debate is possible.
However, everyone is certain about their experience, but we can never know for certain that we have the same experience, it’s subjective.
Physicalism
- Logical positivist
- protocol statements are about empirical traits of the world, scientists have to come to a consensus, so then intersubjectivity (the relation or intersection between people’s ideas/perspective) comes in play. The basis if science is constituted by what we see with our bodily eyes (physical objects). Truth does not consist in the agreement of statements and facts (correspondence), but in the agreement of statements with other statements (coherence).
Unification of the sciences
All the sciences contribute to the scientific description of the world. No differences between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
Reductionism
- Ontological reductionism: all phenomena can be reduced to one or few substances that obey natural law.
- Theoretical reductionism: the theories of the higher sciences can be translated in terms of more basic sciences.
