Sorry about the intemperate tone of the last post. Scott's comments on
positivism, to which I was replying, were very confused, but I was wrong to
have used rude language, and I apologize. I should explain that I was
trained as a philosopher of science by, among others, Carl Hempel, an
original member of the Vienna Circle, and later by Larry Sklar, who is
probably the closest thing we have to a living logical empiricist. It's
probbaly not worth going on about much, and I'll stop here, but a few
quickes in response to Ravi:
1. Ravi doubts whether logical empiricism is a dead horse.
>
>i am not entirely sure you are right, especially since there is no
>clean line of separation of philosophy from other fields.
Fair enough. In philosopher, LP is dead. But in political science, they
haven't heard the terrible news. In "behavioralist" polisci of the sort I
was taught at Michigan, the "methods" section of any class is a (to a
philosopher) quaint recap of high positivism a la 1947.
the
>motivation underlying many of today's science anti-science debates
>(including the science wars that we started out discussing), on
>the scientistic side, is, i suspect, a positivist one.
I don't think so here, though. You don;t have to be an LP to be teed off at
the scientific ignorance, obscrantism, and pretentiousness of the critics.
That was Sokal's point.
>>
>the politics of wittgenstein's involvement and differences with the
>vienna circle are well documented but his influence on the group is
>unquestionable.
Absolutely, and I just said he wasn't an LP, a position that didn't evcen
exist when he wrote the Tractatus.
russell and many other mathematicians, scientists
>and philosophers of the period actively argued against positivism.
Right, though The Philosophy of Logical Atominsm influenced the LPs too.
>>
>>The biographical facts I have mentioned above suggesr that thsi may be a
>>mistake [i.e., to think that positivism is a right wing view].
>>
>
>i think that hinges on what one calls the "left". perhaps the
>political left, socialists and marxists, found great utility in
>positivism. however, if one were to include relativists, and
>humanists of a particular kind (russell might be one, but here i
>include anyone who wished to uphold diversity in knowledge and
>ways of life and deny absolute authority to experts), indeed a
>lot of the "left" has despised positivism. this i would suggest
>is again illustrative of the quarrels of the academic left.
Well, good heavens, I didn't say that positivism was the only ledt wing
view! Just that it was consistent with left politics, and in the case of LP,
developed by actual leftists. Although theyw ere mostly leftists, it would
be anachronism to call them members of the "academic left." They were
leftists many of whom were academics. Russell, btw, was not a regularly
employed academic from 1917 on, when Trinity bounced him because of his
opposition to the war. He held intermittent academic positions thereafter.
The LP were not interested in defending the "absolute authority" of experts.
They did take scientific knowledge, particularly modern physics, as having
established reliable knowledge, and used it as their model of what knowledge
should look like.
>pure opinion follows:
>
>personally i would see the left as the intellectual left and the
>humanitarian left and it is the latter that has (imho, rightly,
>as scott says) problems with positivism, behaviourism, etc. this
>humanitarian position is a double-edged sword, it seems, since
>it attempts to uphold the integrity of the individual (by
>denying her reduction to measurable parameters) but plays right
>into the hands of the personal responsibity argument of the
>right.
I don't get this. Maybe I am dense, but why does it uphold the integrity of
the individual to deny that human behavior can be explained in a respectable
scientific fashion? Is the concern about hard determinism, that if our
behavior can be explained, it must be caused by factors outside our control,
and so we are not responsibile for anything we do? Is that the thought, and
the worry is that if we say that we are responsible for our actions, then
that plays into the views of the right? The positivists of course would take
arguments about free will and determinism and moral responsibility as the
classic instance of a meaningless metaphysical problem, rejecting boths ides
of this debate.
the positivist would (rightly?) respond, as dawkins does,
>that describing something in the most exact manner possible,
>while leaving entirely alone guesses about "true nature" etc
>(in fact, denying meaning to such guesses), they emphasize our
>capability for action - to change what we do not like (dawkins
>of course departs a bit, since we could read him to suggest
>that the selfish gene is the "true nature" of humans).
No, they would say what I suggested, that there is literally no meaning in
asking whether we are free or responsible, or not.
>
>the criticism of positivist ethics (or explanation of morality) is,
>i think, that it continues the atomistic and reductionist approach,
>(and if i guess right, tends to push them towards self-interested
>agents and selfish gene theories)
Not at all. Positivist ethics can be as social (or socialist) as one likes.
Positivists were not typically concerned with substantive moral theories but
with the kind of meaning ethical statements had. What is atomistic or
reductionsit about saying that ethical statements are not true or false but
prescriptive, telling us to do this or refrain from that?
>
>>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....
>
>
>popper was, by all accounts, a windbag and i would point to PKF
>who calls him "an insignificant puff in the positivist teacup"
>(popper was PKF's teacher and some have questioned PKF's
>motivation behind criticism of popper,
Yeah, F tended to talk like that. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Note
that F, who knew his history, didn't say that P was a positivist.
but popperians like imre
>lakatos have themselves backed away from his positions).
Um, maybe "developed them" is a better term.
of course
>what the man was is of no relevance, but the debate is quite alive
>in the philosophy of science as to whether popper's theories of
>science, despite their great popularity among the scientists of his
>time, are/were naive at best (certainly i am not qualified to
>critique popper, so i must emphasize that these are not my
>opinions).
Popper is a major philosopher of science. He was more influential in some
circles than others. My training at Princeton and Michigan gave him very
little credit, but at Cambridge he was taken very seriously. A lot of his
ideas were crudely developed initially, but they have proved very fruitful,
and there are still; lots of "critical rationalists" (Popperians) about,
whereas there are virtually no LPs anymore in philosophy.
i respond only to suggest that there has been some
>significant opinion that to some extent agrees with scott's
>description of popper - enough to refrain from calling that view
>stupid. but what do i know, i am stupid too!
No, what was stupid was suggesting that Popper only adopted his views to
curry favor with the bourgeoisie. As I said, Popper was a real right winger,
close to the Austrian economists. He was also an intelligent and sympathetic
critic of Marx whose book on Marx (vol II of Enemies of the Open Society) is
worth reading. He deserves equally careful and sympathetic attention the
left. But using P's anti-Marxism to attack the positivists as antiMarxist is
really wacko, as P was no positivist in their sense, and they were radical
socialists,a nd in Neurath's case, Marxists.
>
>>while positivist reductionism leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as
>does their savage attack on metaphysics, i am not comfortable to
>condemn them altogether. in fact, i find their attack on platonism
>"a good thing".
>
>
What do you mean "reductionism" here? Or "platonism," for that matter?
--jks
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