Pedro Rosario
The Importance of Logical Positivism in History

Autor prowadzi bloga poświęconego m.in. filozofii i teologii PRO2K’S BLOG

One of the things that I couldn never understand why there is so much hate towards Logical Positivist (or Logical Empiricist) movement, in Berlin and Vienna. By this, I don’t mean that much people disagree with Logical Empiricism; of course, I have my disagreements over it. We all know that the Vienna Circle failed its own purpose. But this failure doesn’t mean that the journey was not worth it.

Logical Empiricism has been perhaps one of those philosophical movements that contributed more to philosophy, than perhaps any other philosophical movement. Without it, possibly logic wouldn’t have been developed, mathematics wouldn’t have been developed, good philosophy of science wouldn’t have been possible. This movement is a call to all philosophers to clarity, to sound philosophy, to see things reasonably and logically.

Michael Friedman has written a great book on this subject of the rise of logical positivism: A Parting of the Ways. In it, it describes how philosophers who were acquainted and who were disciples of eminent thinkers of the time (Frege, Husserl, among others), they ended up divinding philosophy into continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. And the thing that distinguished analytic philosophy, thanks to Rudolf Carnap and the Logical Positivist movement, was the call to use reason as criterium for doing philosophy.

Many condemn the Logical Positivist movement because of its rejection to metaphysics. This was nothing new. In fact the whole rejection to metaphysics began in the XIX century as a reaction to the development of German idealism, specially Hegel’s philosophy. Notions as Begriff (concept) or Geist (spirit), and metaphysical dialectics, led many people to reject such notions, because it lacked scientificity. The more scientific sector of philosophy wanted to provide solid scientific grounds for epistemology, mathematics and logic. Because of their rejection to metaphysics, but at the same time of German idealist’s rejection to logical analysis, very few people actually got acquainted with philosophers such as Bernard Bolzano and Hermann Lotze. Bolzano was the founder of semantics (by then logic was coinceived as a theory of meanings) and conceived logical meanings and mathematical propositions platonistically. Lotze also went along those lines, except that for him, mathematics could be reduced to logic. Both philosophers, based on Leibniz’s philosophy, could see the closeness of logic and mathematics. Later one very distinguished philosopher of the scientific sector of philosophy at the time, Franz Brentano, wanted to study Bolzano and other less known thinkers in order to provide a psychological foundation to logic. This philosophical position was called psychologism.

Frege and Husserl, disciples of Lotze and Brentano respectively, presented arguments against psychologism. Frege wrote lots of essays where he showed the fact that logical and mathematical entities and truths are independent of the mind, but the work which was the most prominent in this task was The Foundations of Arithmetic. In Husserl’s case, the most thorough refutation of psychologism was made in the first volume of Logical Investigations called „Prolegomena of Pure Logic”. But perhaps one of Frege’s remarkable contributions was the development of symbolic logic under what he called Begriffsschrift [conceptual notation], which was later perfected by Bertrand Russell, Tarski and other logicians after him. For him, this conceptual notation would help philosophers see things more clearly, just the way one looks at microscopes, and can see tiny details a lot clearer. Of course, because of the Platonist background of his proposal, he suspected that many philosophers would reject it. Then he said something that proved to be prophetic:

This reception [of Frege's ideas] by philosophers will be varied, depending on each philosopher’s own position; but presumably those empiricists who recognize induction as the sole original process of inference (and even that as a process not actually of inference but habituation) will like them least. some one or another, perhaps, will take this opportunity to examine afresh the principles of his theory of knowledge. To those who feel inclined to criticize my definitions an unnatural, I would suggest that the point here is not whether they are natural, but whether they go to the root of the matter and are logically beyond criticism.

I permit myself the hope that even the philosoophers, if they examine what I have written without prejudice, will find in it something of use to them (Frege x-xi).

And indeed they will find them useful. Many events affected philosophy at this time: the XIX century development of Non-Euclidean Geometry, the postulation of the Special Theory of Relativity and General Theory of Relativity, Bertrand Russell’s and A. N. Whitehead’s creation of Principia Mathematica, Russell’s theory of denoting, Husserl’s development of semantics (specially in his Logical Investigations) and phenomenology, Pierre Duhem’s assertion of Physics’ underdetermination, among others. Also as a result of criticisms to phenomenology, Martin Heidegger created his own doctrine of being and time, which was praised initially by Husserl, but later he criticized because of its lack of scientificity.

[The fact that Heidegger at the beginning dedicated Being and Time to Husserl, but later removed it may have influenced Husserl's position. Heidegger did so, when he officially started belonging to the Nazi party, and rejected Husserl because he was a Jew.]

Logical Empiricism arose mostly as a reaction to all of these phenomena. Most of these empiricist philosophers came from Neo-Kantianism, and saw the futility of developing an empiricist view on logic and mathematics as basis for science. So, they began to look to Frege’s work as well of those of Russell and tried to use the tools they developed (mathematical logic) to then confront these new areas of science such as Special and General Relativity, as well as Quantum Physics. In fact, this produced some of the most important gems of XXth century philosophy:

• The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge by Hans Reichenbach
• The Philosophy of Space & Time by Hans Reichenbach
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Der Raum by Rudolf Carnap
• The Logical Structure of the World by Rudolf Carnap
• The Logical Syntax of Language by Rudolf Carnap

[Personally I'm very impressed with The Philosophy of Space & Time, and the Logical Structure of the World.]

Logical Empiricists, when discussing these issues, were more logical than empiricists. In fact, without these discussions, logic wouldn’t have been developed the way it did. Some logical concepts were already present in earlier philosophical works (for example, Carnap’s distinction betweenthe rules of formation and rules of transformation, were already present in Husserl’s fourth logical investigation in Logical Investigations).

But also, the use of logic and mathematics, which they considered analytic, and the facts of the world (synthetic), would enable them to accept or reject metaphysical statements on the following basis:

1. If the metaphysical proposition has no role in logic or mathematics, which are to be accepted as conventions
2. If the metaphysical proposition doesn’t help understand the facts of the world.

Of course, Karl Popper and W. V. O. Quine showed that such attempt is futile. However, the goal of stating those principles is this: we should avoid meaningless metaphysical statements. But I think the core of the whole issue was not abusing language, and not using language in such a way that we create pseudo-problems in philosophy. Rudolf Carnap showed in his famous essay „Elimination of Metaphysics through a Logical Analysis of Language” that many metaphysical statements are the result of the abuse of language, and he showed Heidegger’s „the Nothing itself nothings” [Das Nichts selbst nichtet] as an example of that. He also included the notions of concept and spirit in Hegel’s case as an example.

The primary goal of Carnap and Logical Empiricism as well was to show logically how such language can be abused, and therefore avoid them to guarantee true scientificity. Science, according to them, should use norms conventionally accepted (logic and mathematics) and make statements that have meaning when they are verified with factual statements as they are induced from the material world.

So, even if this conclusion is wrong, there are many virtues of Logical Empiricism in this matter, and I wish to mention them:

• First, as a genuine philosophical movement, it wanted to search for clarity of concepts, and the search for genuine statements with which science can serve as scientific basis.
• Second, it researched extensively the relation between mathematics and scientific theories and laws. This research led to a reevaluation of the notions of analiticity and syntheticity of propositions that have been quite illuminating in philosophy and still affects us today.
• Third, it made a logical and semantical research which led to the most remarkable contributions to this field. Without this research most probably Gödel’s or Tarski’s work wouldn’t have been possible. Their work served also as basis for model theory, the development of set theory, among many other areas of logic and mathematics.
• Fourth, it succeeded in one sense: it found the objective philosophical reality of their proposal, even though it went against many of their suppositions: the rejection of metaphysics and induction.
• It established the logical and epistemological background that would serve as base to develop a Philosophy of Science for the very first time.

Of course, the search for clarity, simplicity, and trying to account for science’s objectivity, rather than deserving our raugh, should be a cause for deep admiration. As I said, even if their suppositions were wrong, and the Vienna Circle ended as a result of seeing the futility of what they were searching for, the journey Logical Empiricists took was worth it. It was undeniably a huge contribution to philosophy.

REFERENCES

Frege, Gottlob. The Foundations of Arithmetic. 1950. Trans. J. L. Austin. IL Northwestern University Press, 1980.

Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways. IL: Open Court, 2000.

If you are interested in knowing more about Logical Positivism for the first time, I recommend the following books:

J. Alberto Coffa. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap. To the Vienna Station. 1991. UK, USA, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1998. This book is a must for anyone who wants to ba acquainted with Logical Positivism.

Michael Friedman. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. UK, USA, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Friedman makes an excellent exposition of the background of Logical Positivism, the way it evolved, and its contributions to philosophy.

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