-From https://www.tumblr.com/search/philosophy%20circle
Gather 'round, ye children and listen to my tale! Tis a tale of a horrible philosophy that died a well-deserved death at the hands of a rascally rogue named Willard Van Ormond Quine. We philosophers suspected it of laying low in the depths of the earth, never to be seen again. Yet, before what was happening, it was being resurrected from the ground by a mischievous cult called "The New Atheists" at which point the undead monstrosity became unleashed like a horde of deadites upon unsuspecting college kids and r/atheism enthusiasts. That Resident Evil Nemesis of philosophy is named "logical positivism."
For the record, this isn't just a blanket pot shot at atheists. While I am not an atheist, I get that atheists aren't all just a bunch of edgy morons who are desperate for their dad's attention. See for example, William Rowe's Evidential Problem of Evil https://www.kul.pl/files/57/nauka/Rowe_The_Problem_of_Evil.pdf
No, this is much worse than a simple dispute over whether or not atheism is cool (or at the very least, a viable philosophy). Instead, this is a shot at a bunch of philosophical-illiterates pushing a school of thought that serious philosophers stopped taking seriously about 50 years ago.
The history of logical positivism can be summed up in the philosophical life of a guy named A.J. Ayer.
A.J. Ayer is famous for being the frontman for the funk band Logical Positivism. “LP” as they were called back in the day, got famous when A.J. wrote their hit single, “The Verification Principle, Baby!” a song about how the only words that mean anything to me are the ones I hear from you…in the form of empirically verifiable statements. Like any song by Warrant, the lyrics told a likable, but shallow story that was written to appease some faceless corporate overlords.
That song made a big splash in the scientific community and in fact, still gets a lot of airplay from guys like Bill Nye (hence, the quote), Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris, and Stephen Hawking (R.I.P.).
Unfortunately, critics and most outside viewers ran the song into the ground for being total crap: it thinks math can’t be used to apply to the real world, has terrible criteria for what counts as an empirical observation, gets screwed hard by the problem of induction, has terrible criteria for what counts as verification, and finally, is completely self-contradictory because the statement, “Only empirically verifiable statements can be meaningful” isn’t empirically verifiable. A.J. finally agreed with his critics and left the band. LP briefly took on a new frontman, Karl Popper, who did a remix of the song called, “The Falsification Principle, Baby!” which got even more airplay in the scientific community, but brought the band to a screeching halt once their record label realized it had 99% of the same stupid problems as the original.
Here's the 5-minute summary:
---> Logical positivism is the belief that the only statements that are meaningful are ones that can be tied to sense data,
meaning that a statement must be able to be either verifiable using sense data (a la Ayer) or falsifiable using sense data
(a la Popper).
---> Implications:
- Science is the one true religion.
- Statements about religion (i.e. "God is omnipotent") aren't just false, they're meaningless
- Literally all of metaphysics is dead. So kiss personal identity, free will, ontology, causality, necessity, and analyticity goodbye (and almost definitely ethics too since ought statements aren't verifiable/ falsifiable)
- Math (which is an axiomatic system) doesn't actually apply to the world; it applies to relationships of ideas or of language (WTF)
Problems:
- What counts as verification? As Popper points out, a significant portion of our experiences rely on the reliability of our interpretation of those experience. For example, if I'm studying a proton through an electron microscope, I'm not directly experiencing that proton- so in what way are my beliefs verified?
1.1 It's not possible to very a universal. Again, Popper points out that a universal statement (e.g. "Water boils at 100 degrees.") would require an infinite amount of sense data to verify. So insofar as we don't have infinite sense data, all universal statements are meaningless. Oops. Sorry, science. - What counts as falsification? This one is Quine's idea. Every empirically-falsifiable statement comes with a bunch of built-in auxiliary hypotheses. For example, "This water will boil at 100 degrees," comes with the auxiliary hypotheses like, "this is standard pressure," "this is actually water," "the thermometer that I'm using actually works," and "I'm not drunk, or stoned, or being deceived by an evil demon." So, suppose that we do an experiment and, uncharacteristically of water, it boils at 99 degrees. Well which proposition is false? Most scientists aren't balls-out enough to just say, "Huh, I guess water DOESN'T boil at 100 degrees," because that would be really stupid. But how do we know which hypothesis is false? Quine says, technically, we can't actually know. After all, what the hell kind of experiment could you perform to prove that your past experiment had a faulty variable? Whatever experiment you came up with wouldn't be testing the faulty experiment- it'd be testing a different experiment. Therefore, even the proposition "X was the faulty variable in my last experiment" is meaningless since it can't be falsified. Is this starting to sound completely retarded yet?
- Did you catch that last implication: MATH IS A LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCT. Like I said, math is axiomatic and so it literally isn't empirically verifiably and therefore DOESN'T APPLY TO THE REAL WORLD, but to relationships of language. So keep that in mind that when you're flying down the interstate at 80mph on your beat up Honda that the only thing keeping it from spontaneously blowing up isn't hard math, but relationships of ideas that (we hope) might correspond to the real world (fingers crossed!)
- The Absolute death knell for LP is the fact that the proposition, "Only propositions that are falsifiable/ verifiable are meaningful" is not falsifiable or verifiable. So, by it's own standards, LP is dead in the water.
If you're an atheist reading this, keep in mind that you don't have to give up on metaphysics just because your friends on r/atheism told you so. If you like your atheism, you can keep your atheism. Being an atheist just means that you are certain of God's nonexistence. However, metaphysical constructs (like Kantian noumena) don't entail God's existence and help keep you from buying into crap philosophy like logical positivism. Besides, as most pragmatists point out, once you get to the upper levels of existence, you basically have to hit an axiom or go home. Don't believe me? Go ahead. Ask a theoretical physicist what kind of experiment he or she could devise to falsify string theory. Can't do it. Because it doesn't actually rely on hard scientific evidence.
(See:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2015/12/23/why-string-theory-is-not-science/#3ed931726524
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-coming.html?source=Snapzu )
But hey! It sure does explain some stuff that we otherwise have no answers for!
True. And that's my point: metaphysics does the exact same thing. So either give up on upper level, axiomatic sciences like math or theoretical physics or find a new reason to hate metaphysics. Your choice.