Thoughts to You from Yours Truly - ( TYYT ) - ( 96 ) - Logical Positivism

Thoughts to You from Yours Truly - ( TYYT ) - ( 96 ) - Logical Positivism


This branch of philosophy of logic had arisen during the 1920-30s and is closely linked to the Vienna School of philosophers. Briefly stated, Logical Positivismi is one of the most dominant branches of philosophy in the Twentieth Century which requires strict and objective proof of every statement made and each theory proposed regarding any discipline of learning. It has positively affected the thinkings of reseachers and theorists alike in various branches of science and philosophy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that logical Positivism has created a new paradigm in both the science and arts disciplines in their theoretical as well as practical aspects. It all started with the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Viennese philosopher who went to war in the Austrian army during World War One. Wittgenstein not only fought bravely for the Austrian emperor but also created a whole set of logical thoughts while serving in the army. In his great classical work Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus he set forth in meticulous details his philosophical views on language, thoughts and reality which became the corner stone of the paradigm shifting school of philosophy known as Logical Positivism. 

His ingenious insights succeeded in forging a sound philosophical connection between the inner world of our thoughts through our language with the reality. It is a brilliant piece of original inspiration enshrined in a comprehensive set of working principles touching every aspect of the world of knowledge, our inner world of thoughts and our world of communication that is our language. The basic rationale for his philosophy is his idea that there must be something in common between the structure of a sentence and the reality that the sentence is referring to. Representation of the reality in our thoughts is made possible by logic but logical propositions themselves are not the true reality ( this is reminiscent of Einstein's comments on mathematical logic quoted in the last chapter ). Therefore, logic is the necessary but not sufficient condition for describing objective reality (OR). This argument is equally applicable to our language which follows the same set of logical system as our thoughts. His demonstration of this argument through his “picture theory of language“ is most convincing. He likened logical propositions to pictures reflecting OR. They are only approximations but can never be 100% of the real thing. Different logical symbols are just like different colours and images in different pictures. They may be able to mimic OR to a very great extent but can never be perfect. The same is true of language which uses a different set of symbols to describe OR. Both logical propositions and language symbols may bear remarkable resemblance to OR they represent but only to certain limits.

Based on this rationale, linguistic statements are only meaningful when they can be related to OR and only observations can prove if such statements are true or false. Furthermore, there can only be two types of statements. First, there are analytical ones which have no empirical contents meaning that they cannot be verified against OR because they do not refer to OR or any objectively observable facts. These are also known as tautologies. For example, the statement :- “ The poor are poor because of their poverty” is a tautology. It is analytical in the sense that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. In other words, it has no empirical content. All the other statements that are not analytical are empirical statements which refer to OR and some objectively observable facts. These are the only meaningful statements because they can be proven right or wrong by reference to the fact that they allege to assert. The above rigid but practical rules make Logical Positivism a very powerful tool in all fields of knowledge including scientific research. It is the logical positivist's motto that if you cannot prove what you say by empirical evidence, you have effectively said nothing. Other Vienna School philosophers built upon this basic theory of Wittgenstein and subsequently formalize the principles to form the Logical Positivism school of philosophy.

The huge impact of Logical Positivism on all aspects of early Twentieth Century science and philosophy had become a big challenge to Cartesian Dualism which had the support of organised religion since the Seventeenth Century. Logical Positivism had unintentionally became the vanguard and a powerful weapon for Monoism. However, there is still some weaknesses in Logical Positivism insofar as it still has to rely on the Verification Principle in proving its case empirically, and therefore, is still restricted by the inborn weakness of the Theory of Induction. Take the inductionist approach in verifying a scientific fact like the sun always rises in the east. Scientists are said to have proven their case with regard to this scientific fact because in the whole of human history up to the present the sun has always risen from the east. Their case is said to have been proven empirically thousands upon thousands of times but it only takes one case of falsification to shoot down the above scientific statement. This is the inherent weakness of the induction method. Of course we know in this incident that the sun will only cease to rise from the east in about 500 million more years' time when its nuclear fuel burns out. There is an informative story about the inductionist method. Once there is a farm full of happy little pigs which are all inductionists. They consider themselves to be smarter than all other pigs in the world because these little pigs know how to predict the future using the induction method. Every morning they are very happy to see their master who opens the gates to feed them. They enjoy life to the full because the pigs only eat and do not have to work. According to their inductionist analysis based on past experience they figure that seeing their master is the greatest joy in the lives. One day as usual, their master comes to open the gates. They greet him with all the usual happy grunts only to find out that they are bound and led to the abattoir to be slaughtered. So, those poor pigs' inductionist predictions did not save them from certain destruction. Therefore, there is no foolproof reliability in the inductionist method and so is the case for any method of prediction. 

This unavoidable weakness in the Theory of Induction has prompted one of the most promising young philosophers of the 1940s called Karl Popper to pioneer his own set of principles in the learning process and scientific research. Popper based his philosophy on what he called the conjecture and refutation procedure. Instead of asking the scientists to prove that their theories are true to empirical observations and experimental results, Popper requires them to concentrate on devising procedures to prove that their theories on conjectures are wrong. This is Popper's famous conjecture and refutation procedure. According to his reasoning, if a certain theory or conjecture has more ways of being refuted it is to be preferred over one which has fewer. By his presumption of the negative results of any scientific theory or conjecture, Popper places tremendous onus on the scientists to prove their case and, thereby, achieving a higher standard for scrutinizing any scientific theory. I do not intend to go into his philosophy in depth but suffice it to say at the present juncture that it does have its weaknesses such as what is known to the philosophy circle as the Problem of Auxiliary Hypothesis. For example, when a conjecture is refuted for any reason it can always be saved by the proposer on the ground that some of the underlying background assumptions that are at fault and not the main body of the conjecture. This will imply that the same conjecture can still survive the “ conjecture and refutation procedure “ after amending its background assumptions. For example, there is the often cited Red Ferrari Hypothesis which states that all Ferraris are red. It can be refuted easily if you see a white one. However, the proposer of the hypothesis can always say that you must have mistaken a white Lamborghini for a Ferrari. There are lots of possible excuses such as someone must have modified the original red paint to white and so on and so forth. So, you will see that no system is totally infallible.