Logical Positivism

According to some, modern science has conquered the world. Some scientists, and some others, have been so impressed by the achievements of science that they believe that everything is a scientific problem and that all scientific problems can be solved. It is just a matter of time, effort and the application of the scientific method.

Other problems that people have, such as decisions over life and death, whether to fall in love (insofar as that might be a decision), how to bring up children, whether to read this novel or watch that television program can all, under this model, be solved by scientific means. A quick brain scan to establish which areas light up with activity when you think about your proto-beloved and you can get the go-ahead for a relationship. The reason we do not do this is that the technology is not quite there yet, and it might take a while to obtain relevant results.

That does not stop some people, of course, from arguing that more or less everything is subject to scientific control and experiment. Nothing else exists – our thoughts about our beloved are ‘nothing but’ brain activity. How we get for a bunch of jumping neurons to a conscious thought about our beloved (or whatever else, of course) is never really explained. Science is reductionist, on the whole, so we can drill down from thoughts to neurons hopping, but not the other way terribly successfully.

The ultimate in this sort of thinking was perhaps the philosophical movement known as Logical Positivism. For various reasons the proponents of this set of ideas (it was not really a single, coherent, movement) was that everything had to verifiable or it could be ruled out as legitimate discourse. The English version of this was promulgated by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, first published in the 1930s. The work introduced the idea of the verification principle, that a proposition is said to be verifiable in the strong sense if and only if its truth could be conclusively established in experience. In the weak sense, a proposition is verifiable if experience could render it probable. This was tremendously influential in Anglo-American philosophy.

The problem is that the verification principle rules out a lot of our normal experience and understandings. ‘Murder is wrong’ is not probable nor can it be verified by experiment – you cannot go an murder a sample of people and establish that it was wrong to do so in each and every case. The world simply does not work the way this philosophy would like it to. Logical Positivists had to resort to ideas such as emotionalism, arguing that a statement such as ‘Murder is wrong’ cannot be verified (a relief to those of us who would rather not see philosophers on the street murdering people) but is an emotional response instead. Our moral world is reduced to our emotional reactions: ‘Murder is wrong’ is at the same level as ‘I love Bach’. Surely something has gone wrong here.

There are other problems as well, of course. Intentionally, Logical Positivists had a tendency to rule that religious statements were non-sense assertions and then, by linguistic sleight of hand aver that religion was nonsense. Now, of course, some religious statements are nonsense, but no more than statements made in other walks of life such as politics or science. The removal of metaphysics, religion and morality from the realm of sense suggests that the whole agenda is a bit flawed.

The verification principle, in its bald form, is ‘no statement is true unless it is a tautology, evident from the senses or self-evident’. Thus, ‘here is a tree’ is verifiably true, as is ‘all unmarried men are bachelors’. As we have seen, ‘murder is wrong’ is not verifiable, but then nor is ‘I love you’ ‘I will meet you tomorrow at five o’clock’ or ‘God sustains the world’. None of these latter statements would usually be regarded as nonsense, however – they are intelligible, even if we cannot agree with them.

The problem is with the verification principle itself. In fact, the principle is self-stultifying. Itself it is neither a tautology, self-evident not evident from the senses. According to its own lights, then, the verification principle is nonsense, or at least, non-sense. I doubt that there are many philosophers in the world who would subscribe to it anymore, and few in the last fifty years or so who would take is terribly serious, except as an example of how philosophy can go badly wrong.

The influence of logical positivism is, however, still widespread in the education system and among some rather, perhaps, philosophically naïve scientists. To be fair, it takes a while for such problems to work their way out of a system. If the current crop of teachers were trained by people who had been trained by those who subscribed to logical positivism, perhaps we should not be surprised that it has a rather long half-life. Similarly, most scientists are philosophically naïve. While there might be late-night undergraduate discussions about the meaning of quantum mechanics, science is simply not taught with an idea of the philosophical background to it.

We therefore land up with eminent scientists making pronouncements that would not be out of place on a logical positivist’s platform. Among these might be ideas that the existence of God or the usefulness of prayer should be subject to experiment. One of two of these ideas have been tried out, of course, such as having people in hospital prayed for and seeing if they recover more quickly than others, or praying that God would strike the subject with lightening to prove He exists.  This is all rather naïve (not to say silly) but can be taken rather seriously by those who subscribe to a logical positivist or total empiricist position.

The real failure in such thought systems is not of science, or of theology or philosophy, but of individuals failing to note that all positions actually return to metaphysics, some set of underlying beliefs that cannot be justified, verified or claimed as being universally true in all times and places. We stand on thousands of years of the evolution of human thought, and we do not arrive at the ‘big questions’ without some background knowledge and understanding. If we start to assume that the place where we stand the only coherent one, then we have not just lost any argument with those who differ from us, we have rather lost our ability to be in the discussion at all.