2.1 (The Empiricist Tradition)
-> An introduction to Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism, which were revolutionary forms of empiricism originating in the 1900’s.
Most Famous Stage of Empiricist Thought:
John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume were prominent philosophers in classical empiricism in the 1600’s and 1700’s.
Their view of mind was known as sensationalist, believing that the role of thought is to track and respond to patterns in the sensations we experience (e.g. sounds and patches of color), which are all the mind has access to.
Skepticism Emerged as a Two-Part Problem Within Empiricism:
-> Skepticism is the idea that we can’t know anything about the world.
External world skepticism: “How can we ever know anything about the real world that lies behind the flow of sensations?”
Inductive Skepticism: “Why do we have reason to think that the patterns in past experience will also hold in the future?”
David Hume
People (& Ideas) of Note:
David Hume: Classical empiricist who made vivid inductive skepticism, and ultimately threw in the towel on both kinds of skepticism of empiricism.
Phenomenalism: the view that the world is just a concept of a patterned collection of sensations, which flourished in the 1800’s.
John Stuart Mill: A phenomenalist English philosopher and political theorist who in 1865 said matter could be defined as, “a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.”
Ernst Mach: A phenomenalist Austrian physicist and philosopher who illustrated his phenomenalist view by drawing a picture of the world as it appeared through his left eye to show that all that exists is a collection of observer-relative sensory phenomena.
Leibniz: A rationalist who, like Descartes, believed that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that doesn’t depend on experience (e.g mathematics).
Immanuel Kant: A German philosopher who, in the 1700’s, argued that all our thinking involves a subtle interaction between experience and preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of experience. Key concepts like space, time, and causation can’t be derived from experience, because a person must already have those concepts in order to use experience to learn about the world.
Showdown between Rationalists vs Empiricists in the 1600’s & 1700’s
Rationalists (Leibniz, Descartes) believed that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that doesn’t depend on experience.
Rationalist: a term used to indicate confidence in the power of human reason.
Empiricists (Locke, Hume) insisted that experience is our only way of finding out what the world is like.
Empiricists have often tended to think of the mind as confined behind a ‘veil of ideas’ or sensations, with no access to anything outside the veil.
Problems with this view of empiricism:
the mind doesn’t just passively receive the imprint of facts
the mind is active and creative in interpreting those facts
Kant bridged the two by saying that all our thinking involves an interaction between experience and the preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of it.
Key concepts like space, time, and causation can’t be derived from experience because a person must already have those concepts in order to use experience to learn about the world.
Views called ‘rationalist’ in the 1900’s are often actually forms of empiricism that indicate confidence in the human power of reason.
The Empiricist Tradition Has Tended to Be:
Pro-science
Worldly rather than religious
Politically moderate or liberal
2.2 (The Vienna Circle)
Logical Positivism was an extreme form of empiricism that was established during the 1920’s in post-WWI Europe by a group of scientifically-minded people known as the Vienna Circle. Some of them were democratic socialists.
It was a plea for Enlightenment values as opposed to mysticism, romanticism, and nationalism. Reason > The Obsure + Logic > Intuition.
They wanted a universal and precise language that everyone could use to communicate clearly.
Positivism: A 19th century scientific philosophy in which certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from sensory experience, and interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge.
Positivism holds that valid knowledge (certitude or truth) is found only in this a posteriori knowledge.
Verified data (positive facts) received from the senses are known as empirical evidence; thus positivism is based on empiricism.
Systems of thought that the Logical Positivists Were Against:
Absolute idealism: Hegel’s absolute idealist work on the relation between philosophy and history in which he lauded the role of the state as a whole in creating reality, while devaluing the individual’s role in reality. Opposed to liberal democratic ideas.
Existentialism: Heidegger’s argument that we must understand our lives as based upon practical coping with the world, rather than knowledge of it – and that all experience is affected by awareness of our own death, so the best we can do is stare it in the face and live an ‘authentic’ life.
People (& Ideas) of Note:
Ludwig Wittgenstein: An eccentric philosopher of logic and language from the early 1900’s who wasn’t an empiricist, but whose ideas were adopted ( and arguably misinterpreted) by positivists.
G. W. F. Hegel: In the early 1800’s, he was famous for his work on the relation between philosophy and history, saying that human history as a whole is a process in which a world spirit gradually reaches consciousness for itself. Individuals are less important than the state as a whole, especially the role of the state in the grand historical march of progress. His ideas were taken to support strong forms of nationalism. His was an idealist philosophy since it posited that reality is in some sense spiritual or mental. Reality as a whole is said to have a spiritual or rational character (absolute idealism), as opposed to each person’s reality being made up in some way by that person’s ideas. He was opposed to liberal democratic political ideas.
Martin Heidegger: A famously difficult and obscure philosopher who some consider to be an existentialist, he argued that we must understand our lives as based upon practical coping with the world rather than knowledge of it because our experience is shaped by the awareness that we are inexorably moving towards death. Thought we should aim to live ‘authentic’ lives. In a nutshell, he argued that “mortality is our defining moment, that we’re thrown into limited worlds of sense shaped by our being-towards-death, and that finite meaning is all the reality we get.” He was also opposed to liberal democratic political ideas. He joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained a member throughout WWII.
2.3 (Central Ideas of Logical Positivism)
-> Logical positivist views were first and foremost based on a general theory of language.
That theory of language had two main ideas centered around the premise that the aim of science is to track and anticipate patterns in experience:
Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
Verifiability Theory of Meaning
Analytic-Synthetic Distinction:
-> Theoretical vs Observational Parts of Language
Posits that some sentences true or false simply in virtue of their meaning, regardless of how the world happens to be. These are classified as analytic sentences. (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried”).
Analytic:
Analytic truths are are empty truths with no factual content.
Logical positivists claimed that all math and logic is analytic: mathematical propositions don’t describe the world, they just record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way.
Synthetic:
Posits that a synthetic sentence is true or false in virtue of both meaning of the sentence and how the world actually is. (e.g. “All bachelors are bald”)
Synthetic claims about the world can be expressed using mathematical language, but proofs and investigations within mathematics itself are analytic.
A Priori: Means something that is known independently of experience (rationalist philosophers like this term).
* Logical positivism contended that some things can be known a priori, but that they’re analytic, and thus empty of factual content.
Verifiability Theory of Meaning:
The meaning of a sentence consists in its method of verification, a.k.a. knowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing how to verify it.
Verification to logical positivists means verification by means of observation (via sensory experience)
Verifiable = Meaningful (says something about the world).
If a sentence has no possible methods of verification, it has no meaning.
Testable vs Verifiable:
Testable: an attempt to work out whether something’s true or false
Verifiable: only applies when you are able to show that something is true
Verifiability refers to verifiability in principle, not in practice.
So here, verificationism (a strong empiricist principle) implies that experience is the only source of meaning, as well as the only source of knowledge.
Logical Positivist’s Views On Science and The Role of Philosophy in a Scientific Worldview
Distinction between observational and theoretical parts of language, usually individual terms and sentences
Logic (logical analysis) is the main (only) tool for philosophy and philosophical discussion of science.
Logic: Generally speaking, it is the attempt to give an abstract theory of what makes some arguments compelling and reliable.Deductive logic
Inductive logic
Explanatory inference
Science can never reach absolute certainty
Hans Reichenbach distinguished between:
Context of Discovery: The study of the logical structure of science
Context of Justification: The study of historical and psychological aspects of science.
Other Strong Forms of Empiricism Developed During Early 1900’s:
Operationalism: Held that scientists should use language in such a way that all theoretical terms are tied closely to direct observational tests. Akin to logical positivism, but expressed more as a proposed tightening up of scientific language than as an analysis of how science already works.
2.4 (Problems and Changes with Logical Positivism)
The Verifiability Principle was hard to formulate in a way that would exclude the obscure traditional philosophy but include all of science due to the logic of statements containing “and,” as well as other limitations.
Individual claims about the world can’t be tested in isolation without considering their place in the larger whole. You can’t test a single sentence or hypothesis in isolation – you can only test complex networks of claims and assumptions. Solution: Holism.
In order to test one claim, you need to make assumptions about many other things, like measuring instruments, circumstances of observation, reliability of records and of other observers, etc.
When you think you’re testing one idea, you’re really testing a long, complicated conjunction of statements
Holism: A form of empiricism that posits that you can’t understand a particular thing without looking at its place in a larger whole. A single hypothesis or sentence can’t be tested in isolation – only the complex networks of claims and assumptions encompassing that hypothesis or sentence can be tested because only that macro structure can make definite predictions about what we should observe.
W.V. Quine: Argued for a holistic theory of testing and meaning. Also argued that the analytic-synthetic distinction doesn’t exist and that there’s no way to make scientific sense of a sharp analytic-synthetic distinction. Said that all our ideas and hypotheses form a single “web of belief” which has contact with experience only as a whole. He thought that a person’s total set of beliefs form a single network.
Duhem-Quine Thesis refers to holism about testing, which in turn leads to holism about meaning in general in language.
Quine argued that the Analytic-Synthetic distinction doesn’t exist because:
The idea of analyticity treats some claims as immune to revision, but no statement is immune to revision
There’s no way to make scientific sense of a sharp analytic-synthetic distinction due to holism about testing
All our ideas and hypotheses form a single web of belief which has contact with experience only as a whole
2.5 (Central Ideas of Logical Empiricism)
It became a program of careful logical analysis of language and science as opposed to an attempt to destroy traditional philosophy. But ideas about language still guided their ideas about science.
The analytic-synthetic distinction was now regarded as questionable.
A holistic empiricist theory of meaning replaced verifiability theory.
Theories are abstract structures that connect many hypothesis together
These structures are connected, as wholes, to the observable realm
Each bit of a theory – each claim or hypothesis or concept – doesn’t have some specific set of observations associated with
A theoretical term (electron, gene) derives its meaning from its place in the whole structure and from the structure’s connection to the realm of observation.
Feigl’s Orthodox View of Theories
A single scientific theory is composed of a network of theoretical hypotheses (postulates) is connected by stages to the soil of experience. This anchoring is the source of the network’s meaning.
Distinction between theoretical vs observational parts of language were retained by Logical Empiricists
But observational language in this case no longer refers only to descriptions of private sensations
Logical positivist views about the role of logic in philosophy and the sharp separation between the logic of science and historical-psychological side of science remained unchanged.
Explaining something in science means showing how to infer it using a logical argument
The premise of the argument has to include at least one natural law
Like Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism still claimed that scientific language ultimately only describes patterns in observables, but it was a tenuous claim.
Hempel argued that the only possible role for the parts of language that seem to refer to unobservable entities is to help us pick out patterns in the observable realm
Plato: An Ancient Greek philosopher who distinguished the illusory, unstable world of “appearance” from the more perfect and real world of “forms.”
Scientific theories are aimed at describing unobservable real structures – something empiricist philosophy of language opposes.
Much of science is a process in which people hypothesize hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena.
And in general, the aim of theorizing is to describe hidden levels of structure.
But Logical Empiricists dug in their heels against the idea of this hidden world of structures:
“In science, there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.”
– Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath in 1929
So Logical Empiricists insisted that Prediction is the goal of science instead of the goal being describing hidden structures:
Prediction: A substitute for the more obvious-looking, but ultimately forbidden (for logical positivists, anyway) goal of describing the real hidden structure of the world – prediction was the goal of science according to logical positivists.
The Error of Logical Empiricists Was In Denying This Hidden Reality
Scientific Realism: we can make sense of science only by treating much of it as an attempt to describe hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena.
There’s a continuum between structures that are more accessible to us, and structures that are less accessible to us
Genes are not as hidden as electrons which are not as hidden as quarks
2.5 (On the Fall of Logical Empiricism)
The downfall of Logical Empiricism resulted from the following:
Breakdown of the view of language that formed the basis of many of their ideas
Pressure from holist arguments
Failed attempts to develop an inductive logic
The development of a new role for fields like history and psychology in the philosophy of science
Pressure from scientific realism
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