Beating on "positivism" is beating a dead horse, if logical empiricsim is
meant--at least in philosophy. However there are serious inaccuracies in the
following that I will comment on.
> >
>
>Most of the folks attempting to answer Carrol's question about postivism
>have
>been referring to A. J. Ayer, the Vienna Circle
Ayer was a left Labourite, fairly radical. The LPs of the Vienna Circle
were, as we now know, almost all revolutionary socialists.
and others who were or are
>positivists of one variety or another. They might also mention the
>Wittgenstein of the "Tractatus"--who inspired the VIenna Circle, and
>Bertrand
>Russell of the "logical atomist" period, who inspired Wittgenstein.
There are affinities between W's Tractarian views and the LPs, but W was no
positivist even at this point. He was, btw, sympathetic to Communism.
Russell's Logical Atonomism also has affinities to LP, but is a quite
distinct view. Though no Bolshevik, indeed a critic of Bolshevism, Russell
was a radical socialist, and a militant, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is
actvist his whole long life.
But I
>think what Carrol is looking for is some definitions and condemnations of
>positivism FROM THE LEFT perspective which explain why the LEFT has
>traditionally despised positivism (and rightly so in my opinion).
The biographical facts I have mentioned above suggesr that thsi may be a
mistake.
>
>A good place to start on questions like this is the old "Handbook of
>Philosophy", adapted by Howard Selsam from the Soviet "Short Philosophic
>Dictionary" edited by M. Rosenthal and P. Yudin. (Yes, I know there are
>more
>sophisticated works of this type, including later revisions of this work
>from
>the USSR. But this early work is a good place to start on matters like this
>just because it IS shorter, and "less sophisticated". I.e., it often jumps
>right to the heart of the matter, and doesn't pull any punches. That is,
>its
>crudeness, partisanship and intemperance is something of a virtue!)
What it has to offer is a rehash of Lenin's 1908 attack on Mach, AVernerius,
and the empiriocritics, a book that is not bad for a philosophical amateur,
but full of errors and confusions--L doesn't, for example, distinguish
between positivism and Berkelyean idealism, or between Berkleyean idealism
and Kantian transcendental idealism. He ties idealism to "fideism" and
religion, not grasping that the religious need to be realists as much as the
left. Etc.
Here is
>what the 1949 edition has to say about positivism:
>
>"POSITIVISM, one of the most widespread of the anti-materialist currents in
>contemporary bourgeois philosophy. Claiming to stand above materialism and
>idealism, positivism holds that it bases itself only on 'experience' and
>that, consequently, it must reject the attempt to discover the essential
>nature of things. In this regard, it takes the position of philosophical
>agnosticism (see).
This is a correct characterization so far as it goes of LP, but the LPs did
not think that the reality of the external world was a matter about which to
be agnostic. They thougtht the question of whether it was real made no
sense.
However, limiting its concept of experience exclusively to
>subjective sensations, it falls into the position of idealism.
This is probably fair, although the LPs thought that idealism was just as
much nonsense as materialism. But the Lps were clear that one might do the
"logical constructioon of the world" (Carnap) starting from material as well
as sensational postulates--subjective sensation was not privileged for them.
The starting point is arbitrary. Nelson Goodman wrote a book doing just
this, The Structure of Appearance. The "idealism" is not the privileging of
subjective sensation but the failure to privilege objective reality.
When it deals
>with social phenomena, it tends to explain the evolution of society by the
>levels reach in the intellectual development of man, of which the three
>principal stages are: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive,
>as
>asserted in the work of Comte (see), nineteenth-century progenitor of
>positivism.
This confuses LP with Comtean positivism. LP had no general view of social
reality. The most prominent LP who had such an articulated view was Otto
Neurath, a Marxist and defender of historical materialism.
Positivism supports the existing order, admits only slow
>evolutionary processes, and opposes revolution.
As a statement of the philosophy, not true. LP and related views say nothing
about these topics. As a statement about the philosophers who held these
views, also not true. See above.
At the close of the
>nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century all philosophers who
>tried
>to find a place somewhere between materialism and idealism, and to
>'transcend' the opposition between these two basic schools of thought,
>tended
>to gravitate to the positivists.
Not true either. What about the existentialists and their precusors, the
phenomenologists and theirs?
> "Lenin in his 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' [1908] presents a
>thorough-going critique of positivism. After the First World War positivism
>was revived in Europe, especially in Austria, and spread to England and
>America under the name of 'logical positivism' or 'logical empiricism'."
>
>I would add there there tends to be a fairly strong Kantian odor to
>positivism, suggestive of his claim that we can't know the real essential
>nature of a thing, the "ding-an-sich", but merely exterior "sense data" (as
>Russell put it).
There is a Kantian odor to LP--Michael Friedman has explained the Kantian
roots of LP. However, it is incorrect to characterize it as you do. The LPs
thought that questioons about "real natures" literally made no sense, had no
cognitive content. Not only is there nothing to know, there is nothing to
ask. There is nothing "exterior" about the experience we seek to organize in
science, for the LPs, because there is nothing "interior" or "real" of which
it is experience. This is not a Kantian position. Kant throught you could
ask, but couldn't answer.
For example, we can't know what a tree actually looks like,
>since all we "really" come in "contact with" are photons which bounce off
>the
>tree and end up on our retinas.
Ugh. This is hopelessly wrong as to both Kant and the positivists. Of course
you can know what a tree actually looks like. It _looks_ like that bushu
thing we experience. What the LPs denied was whether we could senisibly as
if it was _really_ like the way it looks, apart from any implications such a
question might have about other experiences we might have of it. K denied
that we could _know_ the tree in itself apart from the transcendental
conditions of knowledge--most importantly causality, space and time.
Positivists (and Kantians) assume that the
>existence of any intervening MEANS of knowing something precludes true
>knowledge of it. (If they really thought about this for a moment they might
>realize it implies nobody can ever really know ANYTHING.)
This is ignorant on two counts. Neither K nor the LPs thought any such
thingh. K thought that we had lots of empirical knowledge, and that it was
only through the action of the kind that we did. The LPs also thought we
have lots of empirical knowledge; they just denied that there was other
kinds of knowledge, such as metaphysical knowledge. Here they followed Kant.
And it is a rash person whoa ccuses K or the LPs of not having thought of an
obvious point.
>
>Positivists often oppose theoretical postulated entities, and denounce them
>as mere "hypothetical constructs". Or even deny they exist at all, as Mach
>did in the case of atoms. (He recanted late in life, but only when the
>evidence had long since become overwhelming.)
No, the LPs don't "oppose" theioretical entities. Even the msot austere view
of them allows science to use them--after all, who are the LPs to dictate to
science!--but treats them as "constructs," ways to organize experience.
Mach's doubts about atoms were quite reasonable in his day, and motivated by
science, not philosophy. He was, as you say persuaded by the evidence. If it
had been a philosophical objection to unobservable entities as such, he
wouldn't have been.
>
>But it is in the social sphere that positivism really gets totally screwy.
>All morality and ethics, for example, is denounced as "metaphysics"--by
>which
>the positivists mean "nonsense".
Rubbish. The LPs thought that ethics had "emotive" rather than "cognitive"
meaning, that it wasn't true or falsa, but correct or not. You confuse their
denunciation of traditional philosophy and religion with their views of
ethics.
(Ethics is pretty easily explained in terms
>of collective interests, and of class interests in class society,
Pretty easily, eh? Well, explain em, and get yourself a chair at Harvard.
but
>positivists are completely ignorant of such ideas which arose first among
>the
>great thinkers of the Enlightenment,
This is really stupid. The LPs, as explained, lived in Red Vienna. Most of
them were radical socialists. Neurath was a Marxist,a nd explained his ideas
to his friends at length--persuaded many of them, too. In the broader sense
of positivism, there was not a one of the thinkers who had nod heard and
thought about class conflict and collective interest, not even someone as
unworldly as Wittgenstein.
and were re-formed in class terms by
>Marx and Engels.)
Marx, I recall, denounced morality as "mere ideology," and calledtalk of
justice "the old shit."
Instead positivist writers on ethics hold views such as
>that moral statements merely express emotions. (E.g., "Murder is wrong"
>means
>"I disapprove of it and you should too.")
This is inconsistent with the characterization of ethics as metaphysical
nonsense. It is also the crudest sort of emotivism. Noncognitivist views can
be sophisticated and plausible. It is possible they are right--they are
certainly more promising thana glib dismissal of moarlity as ideology.
>
>Karl Popper, who was strongly influenced by the Vienna Circle, and remained
>a
>positivist of sorts his whole life,
Aaaak. Popper was a savage critic of psoitivsim, and it drove him bats when
people confused his falsificationsit realism with their verificationist
antirealism.
took a similar line against the very idea
>that a science of history might be possible. He condemned all such
>theories,
>including Marx's historical materialism as "historicism".
Nonsense again. That is not what Popper means by "historicism"--he's
attacking a whole set of relativist views--he reads Marx as relativist. He
does have arguments that there cannot be historical laws--nontrivial
arguments. It is not clear how these affect a plausible version of
historical materialism.
Of course,
>attacking Marx will win you lots of friends and influence in bourgeois
>society.
It's stupid to suggest that Popper only believed his ideas to win friends
and influence respectable people. He was a right winger, as it happens, but
he offered real arguments for his views. And what about Neurath and Carnap
and Hempel and Reichenbach, LPs and socialists all?
Note once again the common thread here though--the dogmatic claim
>that scientiific knowledge of various types are "impossible".
Nothing dogmatic about Popper's views: they are extensively reasoned.
Hempel, btw, defendedthe possibility of historical laws and knowledge. So he
doesn't fit it with this thread?
But since the
>bourgeoisie has no coherent theory of history of their own, and since they
>cannot possibly accept the Marxist theory that says that capitalism is
>merely
>a transitory stage to history, their only alternative is to argue that NO
>scientific theory of history is possible.
Well "the bourgeoisie" might not, but the LPS, or some of them, not only
accepted this, but argued for it.
>
>Modern bourgeois economics, too, has a strongly positivistic streak.
True enough/
Most
>bourgeois economists don't even seriously TRY to explain basic things like
>business cycles,
Huh?
and all of them denounce nearly every aspect of Marxist
>economics.
True, but frankly most AMrxist economics isn't that much tow rite home
about. A lot of it reads like the stuff you're peddling here.
>They tend to focus on narrow esoteric and technical issues,
Unlike people concerenedw ith the rising organic composition of capital,
say? Or the solution to the transformation problem? Come on, scholarship is
the stody of esoteriv, narrow, and technical issues.
and
>deny that a true scientific POLITICAL economy of capitalism is even
>possible.
>The folks in this mail group can give many specific examples of how
>positivism manifests itself in establishment economics much better than I
>can.
>
>But the fact remains that it is not wrong to point out positivist
>tendencies,
>and condemn them, whether they are in economics or elsewhere. It is true
>however that we should all do a better job of explaining just what is wrong
>with such views, and not just leave it at the level of perfunctory
>sloganeering.
Amen to that.
--jks
>
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
