Following WWI a group of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers gathered in Vienna to discuss recent events in logic. This informal gathering, labeled as the Vienna Circle, sought a formal and systematic reduction of human knowledge to ‘acceptable levels’.
Logical positivism, aka logical empiricism, resulted from this meeting. Logical positivism allows only logical tautologies and first-person observations to be considered as accurate forms of acceptable knowledge. The influences resulting from the Vienna Circle have proven to be enormous.
A sentence is factually significant only if I know what observations make it true or false. This idea, logical empiricism, leaves no room for anything to be considered as significant knowledge except empirical observations and meaningless but useful tautologies of math and logic.
Rudolf Carnap’s book “The Logical Structure of the World†(1929) attempts to construct in scientific language the structure of the whole world. It is this detailed analysis that led to the discovery of the difficulties of this procedure. The result was Karl Popper’s insight that we cannot establish truth but we can only prove that which is false; this leads into Popper’s theory of falsifyability.
This program of logical positivism left little room for serious considerations of value and morality.
Five decades passed, following the Vienna Circle, before John Rawls broke up the strangle-hold on moral considerations exerted by logical positivism. Rawls book “A Theory of Justice†constructs a theory of justice that is somewhat like constructing the grammar of a natural language.
Questions for discussion:
Did you realize that we cannot prove the truth of any factual claim?
I agree that we can’t prove the “Truth” of any factual claim.
Math and logic are good for determining consistency, which can give us reason for a justified belief, but not Truth with a capital “T”.
A major problem is that these philosophers are telling you that the need to prove truth is a Truth, and so they commit the same error that they warn against.
“Prove” is a construct.
“Prove” is the socket of the light bulb.
The mouth and the tongue want the food to “prove” itself as being tastey.
This is a matter of psychological tastes, cravings and values…
And hardly any beings on earth are critical “scientists” of that sort, nor should they be.
After which, if “truth” must first be “proved” that it is “truth”, it passes through the fire of “proof”, so that “truth” is only “proof”.
Behind the language, here, there is merely a filter.
And after sensation passes through such a filter, a label is placed on its packet: “true”/“proof”. It’s archetypical, selective, oh-so-human.
A tautology means a needless repetition of an idea. Math and logic are tautologies because they are closed systems, just as a “Men’s Club” has only male members. Math and logic start with assumptions and rules and thus everything in it is true to these assumptions and rules. Thus to say 2+2=4 is true is stating a tautology because, if it is correct in accordance with this closed system, then it must be true.
In our common sense day-to-day world we have “proof†of many things. “Seeing is believingâ€, if I saw it then it is certainly true. We have jury trials wherein we “prove†guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. We are so certain of our proof that we execute people based upon these certainties. However, when we are dealing in the philosophical domain concerning empirical matters we are confined to a different metric for determining the validity of statements.
In epistemological matters we use deductive reasoning when going from generalities to specifics and we use inductive reasoning when we go from specifics to generalities. Inductive reasoning produces no certainties; this form of reasoning can provide us only with probability.
By this, truth is also a tautology,
Because it starts with the assumption that anything can be “truth” and things other than the “true” are “false”.
It is a repetition of affirmation and regection.
Humans live, breath and eat in cycles.
Their entire existence is a circular tautology, and a dogma or necessitation.
Could there be some yet to be observed evidence in nature which could facilitate a sort of paradigm shift for our understanding and all things preciptated from it?
If we found the boundaries of the universe,(assuming that they exist), what would happen to the systems by which we comprehend things? What might be the real world implications of such evidence?
If such evidence were to be discovered, would it most likely be discovered my mathematicians?
If so, would this mean that math was no longer part of a closed system? Or would math then be what “closed the system” of the universe?
What I love about logical positivism is that its very own verifiability principle, which is at the centre of the whole thing, states that it is itself meaningless.
(The verifiability principle being that only statements which are capable of being experimentally verified have any meaning).
“A tautology means a needless repetition of an idea.” Tautology has come to mean this, but this is not the sense of the word used by the logical positivists or formal logicians anywhere.
Any deductively valid argument (if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true) is a tautology, because in no situation could it (the statement) turn out to be false.
Thus, the logical positivists cannot be dismissed just by saying that they do not hold up to their own critieria.
For the logical positivists, the meaning of a word comes whether it can be true or false. Only statements which are analytic or empirically verifiable can be said to be true or false, so only these can have meaning.
This is a logical tautology. IF the meaning of a word comes from its ability to have a truth value and IF only analytic or verifiable statements can have a truth value, THEN only analytic or verifiable statements can have meaning. This is a standard chain argument, and thus is valid, and thus can have a truth value.
Sure, its somewhat circular, because it order to have meaning it requires this theory of meaning… however i challenge you to find ANY theory of meaning that does not come up agaisnt such a circularity.
Of course the problem with this argument is that words have meaning beyond their truth value, such as evaluative words like “good”, and also that just because we cannot see how we might check the truth value of other things does not mean that they do not have them. The argument is valid, but it is also highly unsound.
Here’s a new thread I started on why the Verifiability Criterion doesn’t render itself meaningless. It seems to be exactly what J is saying, but still worth reading, as I say it somewhat differently.
