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RECENT PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Logical Positivism |
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Diagrams The Development of Modern and Recent Philosophical Thought Major Influences on American Social Thought Logical positivism is a 20th-century philosophical movement in the tradition of analytic and linguistic philosophy. Like earlier forms of positivism, it had close ties to British empiricism and was marked by respect for natural science and hostility to metaphysical speculation. It originated, however, with a group of German and Austrian philosophers known as the Vienna Circle. At first just a discussion group, it later became a more formal organization, publishing its own philosophical journal. Organized by Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), who came to the University of Vienna as professor of philosophy in 1922, it also included Herbert Feigl, Kurt Godel, Hans Hahn, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap (after 1926). The Vienna Circle was decisively influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, though he was never really a member of it. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein:
The logical positivists used this argument for the meaninglessness of metaphysical propositions but interpreted it in a way that Wittgenstein almost certainly did not intend. Wittgenstein had distinguished in an abstract way between elementary and complex propositions. The positivists took his elementary propositions to be reports of observations. This was the origin of their central idea, the verification principle, which said that any meaningful proposition, other than the tautological or, as they came to be called, "analytic" propositions of logic and pure mathematics, had to be verifiable by means of observation. Propositions belonging to traditional metaphysics -- such as those about the existence of God, for example -- were deemed not to meet this condition and were declared meaningless. Metaphysical statements were not the only ones to fail the test. Ordinary moral judgments seemed to fail it too. One way this was dealt with was by saying that such judgments were expressions of emotion, rather than genuine propositions. With the elimination of metaphysics, the business of philosophy was seen as the logical clarification of scientific statements and theories -- for example, putting informally stated theories in strict axiomatic form, so as to distinguish clearly their analytic from their empirical elements. Nevertheless, a good deal of controversy centered on the interpretation of the principles of logical positivism itself.
Eventually, the original strong notion of verification gave way to a weaker notion of confirmation. Attempts to make this notion precise by constructing a formal inductive logic met with only limited success, however. In general, the more the verification principle was qualified, the harder it became to distinguish logical positivism from other forms of logical empiricism.
In contemporary philosophy, especially in the United States, the spirit of logical positivism can be seen in the respect for science, distrust of high-flown jargon (or what is thought to be such), and insistence on clarity and rigorous argument. Its specific theoretical ideas are no longer accepted in their original form. The Analytic Movement The analytic and linguistic movements, which have strongly influenced 20th-century British and American philosophy, have focused on the logical clarification of various kinds of statement. The analytic movement began about the turn of the century with Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, both of Cambridge University, as its cofounders. At first, Russell and Moore seemed to be working along the same lines, for both reacted against the neo-Hegelian idealism of F. H. Bradley, which held that the world one experiences is only appearance, not reality. But whereas Russell rejected idealist metaphysics in favor of a metaphysics of his own, which he came to call "logical atomism," Moore abandoned metaphysical speculation altogether. Moore embodied the respect for common sense that became characteristic of much subsequent analytic and linguistic philosophy, a respect that Russell never shared. In "On Denoting," a paper of 1905, Russell first put forward his theory of descriptions:
Russell's greatest analytic achievement was his reduction of mathematics to logic by the development of a new system of symbolic logic, far more powerful than the traditional Aristotelian theory of the syllogism. Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's monumental Principia Mathematica came out in three volumes from 1910 to 1913. By accounting for the distinctive character of mathematical truths without recourse to problematic metaphysical assumptions, Russell opened the way for a new, logically sophisticated version of empiricism, for which he was a leading spokesperson. Russell thought of the new logic as the bare bones of an ideal language, a language in which the wording of all propositions would reveal their true logical forms. One of Russell's pupils, the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein, argued that language's capacity to represent the world depended on their sharing a common structure, the structure of logic. Thus what Russell saw as an ideal, Wittgenstein saw as already hidden in language, waiting to be uncovered by analysis. According to Wittgenstein, any meaningful statement not belonging to logic or pure mathematics was a statement of fact. Moreover, all statements of fact had to be analyzable into "elementary propositions," which were, in a technical sense, "logical pictures" of possible facts. The adherents of logical positivism, who were strongly influenced by Wittgenstein's ideas...
Beginning in the 1930s and coming to fruition in the 1940s and '50s, however, there was a reaction against the Russellian and positivist conceptions of analysis; this reaction led to the emergence of ordinary-language philosophy. The leading figures in this movement were Wittgenstein and John Wisdom at Cambridge and Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin at Oxford. Russell and the early Wittgenstein had a general program for reforming or uncovering the logical structure of language:
Russell's heir in analytic philosophy is the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine:
Although the philosophy taught and practiced in major British and American universities today is by and large the outgrowth of the analytic and linguistic movements, it must be recognized that even philosophers willing to be described as analytic question or reject outright most of the theoretical presuppositions of analytic and linguistic philosophy as it was originally formulated. In calling themselves analytic philosophers, they mean to indicate their continuing interest in the problems that the analytic tradition addressed and their respect for the standards of clarity and rigor in argument that are its legacy. In The Radical Academy
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