Logical Positivism

Logical positivism was a 20th-century movement in Western philosophy that embraced verifications, an approach that sought to legitimize philosophical discourse based on empirical science.  It is a continuation of the empirical tradition from Francis Bacon to Thomas Hobbs to John Locke to George Berkeley to David Hume.

It began from discussions of a group known as the First Vienna Circle which gathered during the early 1900s in Vienna at the Café Central (‘hot and heavy’ days of quantum theory). The philosophical position of the Vienna Circle was called logical empiricism, logical positivism or neopositivism. It was influenced by Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, French conventionalism (Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem), Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein. Its goal was to make philosophy scientific with the help of modern logic.

After World War I the Vienna Circle’s new doctrines (along with the Berlin Circle) spread during the 1920’s and early 1930’s.  The doctrines opposed all metaphysics, especially ontology (ie, ‘idealism’) and synthetic a priori propositions. Metaphysics was claimed not to be wrong, but as having no meaning.  A key milestone was the replacement of ordinary-language concepts with more precise equivalents.

Key proponents of logical positivism was adapted by the United Kingdom and the United States.  Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science, where it promoted the idea that the natural sciences were the basis for all true knowledge (the term ‘humanities’ rose out of American efforts to define the special qualities of the study of literature, language, history and the arts in response to ‘an aggressive form of positivism’).

Logical positivism was sometimes referred to as ‘logical empiricism’ for its strong leaning toward a ridged mathematical framework (especially influenced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s monumental Principia Mathematica).  The overall theme of early logical positivism carried over to Analytic Philosophy:  strong anti-metaphysical polemics and criticism of Kant's doctrine of synthetic a priori truths.  Followers were just  interested in science and basically skeptical of theology and metaphysics.

In the end the logical positivists had tried to find the foundations of science and instead they had reverted to the cave man mentality. Philosopher Sir A.J. Ayer (1910-1989), once advocate of logical positivism, commented, “the positivist set out to sea unfurling the sails of what they took to be a water-tight man o’war, only to find that it leaked badly. They began patching the leaks, and discovered that the patches leaked. By the time the ship sank, they were patching patches on patches”.

Critical Review
In his seminal paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) American philosopher Willard V.O. Quine made it abundantly clear that while there maybe some difference between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘relations of ideas’ (Hume's Fork) it is very difficult if not impossible to create a hard and fast rule to distinguish between them.  For many philosophers “Two Dogmas” was the final nail in the coffin of Logical Positivism.

In his masterpiece, 'The Opium of the Intellectuals' (1955), Raymond Aron comments, "Except in Brazil, Positivism has never transcended the limits of a sect.  It never became the doctrine of a movement or a party, any more than the 'New Christianity' of Saint-Simon and his followers.  The work of a mathematician, it remain the creed of a small, eccentric group."

Excerpts from Ken Wilber’s ‘A Brief History of Everything’ (1996), ‘The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion’ (1999) and ‘Quantum Questions’ (2001):

● If science is defined as “knowledge” then religion becomes a form of science (eg, science of mediation, science of creative intelligence, Science of Mind, science of New Thought).  Physics becomes a branch of the Tree of Science, which gets us The Medium, The Mystic and The Physicist.

● If science is defined as “empirical-sensory knowledge, instrumentally validated”, the all forms of religion become non-scientific.  Two points of view are possible:
 1) Religion consists of personal faith, values and belief and is not open to scientific scrutiny (this view was pioneered by Kant, Planck, Einstein, Eddington).
 2) Religion consists of:
  a. superstitious, magical, primitive thinking (Comte).
  b. a defensive mechanism expiating guilt and anxiety (Freud).
  c. an opaque ideology institutionalizing alienation (Marx).
  d. A debilitating projection of men’s and women’s inward and humanistic yearnings (Feuerbach).
  e. A purely private emotional affair and not deserving the title ‘knowledge’ (Quine, Ayer, and the positivists).

● The type of knowledge after which physics is striving is much too narrow and specialized to constitute a complete understanding of the environment of the human spirit.

●  The "hard" sciences is "narrow science." That the natural sciences currently allow evidence only from the lowest realm of consciousness, the sensorimotor (the five senses and their extensions).  “Broad Science” includes evidence from logic, mathematics, and from the symbolic, hermeneutical, and other realms of consciousness and, ideally, spiritual practitioners. “Broad Science” trumps “Narrow Science” which trumps “Narrow Religion”.  An integral approach that evaluates both religious claims and scientific claims based on intersubjectivity is preferable to narrow science.