LOGICAL POSITIVISM

1. LOGICAL POSITIVISM Sümeyye Ayar Pelin Yıldırım

2. CONTENTS • Introduction • Hıstory • Themes • Contributions • LogicalPositivismandPhilosophy • References

3. INTRODUCTION • Logical Positivism (also known as logical empiricism, scientific philosophy, and neo-positivism) was a scientifically oriented philosophical movement that arose in the early part of the twentieth century. Its main assertion was that only statements that could be verified empirically were genuine. Logical positivists denied the soundness of metaphysics and traditional philosophy; they asserted that many philosophical problems are indeed meaningless. • According to logical positivism, there are only two sources of knowledge: logical reasoningandempirical experience.

4. Among its members were Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, the leading exponent of logical positivism, Hans Reichenbach, the founder of the Berlin Circle, Alfred Jules Ayer, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Grelling, Hans Hahn, Carl Gustav Hempel, Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann. Moritz SchlickRudolf CarnapHans ReichenbachAlfred Jules Ayer

5. During the 1930s, when Nazism gained power in Germany, the most prominent proponents of logical positivism immigrated to the United States, where they considerably influenced American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. Nowadays, the influence of logical positivism persists especially in the way philosophy is practiced. This influence is particularly noticeable in the attention philosophers give to the analysis of scientific thought and to the integration of results from technical research on formal logic and the theory of probability.

6. HISTORY • - Logical Positivism arose in the early twentieth century from a group of teachers and students from the University of Vienna. This “Vienna Circle,” as it came to be called, consisted of several scientists who wanted to develop a modern and scientific philosophy that would sweep away many of the problems of metaphysics and religion.- • During the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, BertrandRussellandLudwigWittgenstein’sformalism was developed by a group of philosophers in Vienna and Berlin, who formed the ViennaCircleandBerlin Circle into a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). These philosophers wanted to develop a modern and scientific philosophy that would sweep away many of the problems of metaphysics and religion.

7. THEMES A.Verifiabilitycriterion of meaning • According to logical positivism, there are only two sources of knowledge: logical reasoning and empirical experience. The former is analytic a priori, while the latter is synthetic a posteriori • In other words, they adopted the principle of verifiability,according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. The Verification Principledistinguishes genuine factual statements from meaningless statements.  Essential to Logical Positivism, therefore, only empirically verifiable statements were genuine. (To havemeaning, a given statement had to be connected to either empirical data or analytic truth.)

8. A.1 Analyticandsyntheticknowledge • Logical positivists divided knowledge into analytic and synthetic categories. • Analytic knowledge, such as mathematical theorems, is tautological (it is entirely deducable from its presuppositions) and thus can be validated a priori. • Synthetic knowledge, such as assertions about the real world, must be verified a posterioriby observation. Logical positivists rejected the existence of any synthetic a priori knowledge.

9. B.Elimination of metaphysics • . An intented consequence of The Verification Principle caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysicsas being unverifiable and meaningless. • . As an example, Carnap considers the word "principle". This word has a definite meaning, if the sentence "x is the principle of y" is supposed to be equivalent to the sentences "y exists by virtue of x" or "y arises out of x". The latter sentence is perfectly clear: y arises out of x when x is invariably followed by y, and the invariable association between x and y is empirically verifiable. But − says Carnap − metaphysicians are not satisfied with this interpretation of the meaning of "principle". They assert that no empirical relations between x and y can completely explain the meaning of "x is the principle of y", because there is something that cannot be grasped by means of the experience, something for which no empirical criterion can be specified. It is the lacking of any empirical criterion − says Carnap − that deprives of meaning the word "principle" when it occurs in metaphysics. Metaphysical pseudo-statements such as "water is the principle of the world" or "the spirit is the principle of the world" are void of meaning because a meaningless word occurs in them.

10. What is the role of metaphysics? According to Carnap, although metaphysics has not theoretical content, it has a content indeed: metaphysical pseudo-statements express the attitude of a person towards life. The metaphysician, instead of using the medium of art, works with the medium of the theoretical; he confuses art with science, attitude towards life with knowledge, and thus produces an unsatisfactory and inadequate work. "Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability" (Carnap, The Elimination of Metaphysics, in Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.), Logical Empiricism at its Peak, p. 30).

11. Ethics and Aesthetics • A key component of logical positivism is that it rejected statements about ethics and aesthetics as being unverifiable, and therefore not a part of serious philosophical thinking. • A consequence of the Verifiability Principle is that statements about ethical principles are neither true nor false - they are expressions of feeling. Therefore a theory of ethics is impossible. But if ethics is meaningless, a question rises: what is the origin of ethical principles? Among logical positivists, Schlick was the most interested in ethics. He endeavored to give an account of ethics which was compatible with logical positivist philosophy. According to Schlick, ethics is a descriptive scientific theory. A person always prefers those conditions that do not produce pain or produce pleasure; good is whatever gives pleasure and no pain. Good is thus equivalent to beneficial. A person's actions are caused by a wish to benefit. So, the first ethical impulse is an egoistic one. But the motivations to act are not static - they are subjected to the natural evolution and selection. In a society, it is possible that an altruistic way of action is more beneficial than a purely egoistic one. So, there is a contrast between the very first impulse, which suggests an egoistic behavior, and the tendency to act generated by evolution, which suggests a social behavior. This is the origin of ethical principles

12. ContributionsandInfluences of SomeScholars • Themaininfluences on theearlylogicalpositivistswerethepositivistErnstMach, GottlobFrege, BertrandRussellandtheyoungLudwigWittgenstein. • Mach'sinfluence is mostapparent in thelogicalpositivists' persistentconcernwithmetaphysics, theunity of science, andtheinterpretation of thetheoreticalterms of science, as well as thedoctrines of reductionismandphenomenalism, laterabandonedbymanypositivists. • Wittgenstein'sTractatusLogico-Philosophicuswas a text of greatimportanceforthepositivists. TheTractatusintroducedmanydoctrineswhichlaterinfluencedlogicalpositivism, includingtheconcept of philosophy as a "critique of language," andthepossibility of making a theoreticallyprincipleddistinctionbetweenintelligibleandnonsensicaldiscourse. TheTractatusalsoadheredto a correspondencetheory of truth.Wittgenstein'sinfluence is alsoevident in certainformulations of theverificationprinciple. 

13. LogicalPositivism and Philosophy • Logical Positivism tried to link philosophy with science since they  typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function. For them, philosophy is concerned with the organization of thoughts, rather than having distinct topics of its own. The only role of philosophy is the clarification of the meaning of statements and their logical interrelationships.  There is no distinct "philosophical knowledge" over and above the analytic knowledge provided by the formal disciplines of logic and mathematics and the empirical knowledge provided by the sciences. Logical positivism was a key step in connecting philosophy more closely to science, and vice versa.

14. REFERENCES • Ayer, Alfred Jules. Logical Positivism. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959. • Friedman, Michael, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. • Murzi, Mauro. The Philosophy of Logical Positivism. The New York Encyclopedia of Unbelief, ed. Tom Flynn, Prometheus Books, 2007 • Weinberg, Julius Rudolf . An Examination of Logical Positivism. London : Routledge, 2001, c1936, vii, 311 s. Links http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vienna-circle/ http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-logical-positivism.htm http://theologicalstudies.org/resource-library/philosophy-dictionary/138-logical-positivism